Flutterwave and the Evolution of Africa’s Payment Infrastructure
Thanks to companies like Flutterwave, Africa’s leading payments company, Africa is rapidly becoming a global hub for digital innovation. As the continent seeks to strengthen its economy through commerce and connectivity, a raft of new startups makes the future look bright.
Historically, Africa’s payment systems have been a patchwork of ever-changing rules and regulations that span multiple currencies and cater to very different marketplaces. With a continental economy marked by limited access to banking, inefficient cross-border transactions, and slow adoption of digital platforms, Africa was always a gamble for global corporations thinking about expansion.
Having grown accustomed to the pace of the digital economy, multinationals struggled with the long processing times and geographical barriers that were features of the African market.
But all that’s begun to change. A digital revolution across the continent is beginning to boom, and companies like Flutterwave are at the forefront.
What Is Flutterwave?
Flutterwave was started with the vision of providing easy, fast, and secure payment solutions across Africa, according to its founder and CEO Olugbenga “GB” Agboola.
“When we were starting Flutterwave, a major core thesis has always been about making Africa feel like a country,” he said. “And we invested a lot in that philosophy because we believe so much in the fact that payments should be simple in Africa. Payments is extremely broken in Africa, but it can be simple in Africa.”
Agboola first had the idea to start his company while he was working at a bank in Nigeria. At the time, his multinational clients were frustrated by the delays that international monetary transfers took on the continent. Having worked at Google Wallet and PayPal, Agboola knew technology existed to facilitate faster digital payments. He just needed to build an infrastructure to handle it in his homeland.
If Africa had an e-payments platform that worked well across the entire continent, it could lead to dramatic changes across the continent, Agboola believed. Not only would global corporations find the area more desirable for expansion, bringing jobs and opportunities to millions, but the entire technological ecosystem of the continent would be fertile ground for home-grown entrepreneurs to start new businesses.
In Agboola’s mind, it was a small thing that could lead to massive disruption — just like the butterfly effect.
“The butterfly is a tiny insect, but the fluttering of the butterfly’s wings can make waves, and I thought — Flutterwave,” he said. “I wrote the name down in 2010, and the rest is history.”
A Recipe for Growth
First launched nine years ago, Flutterwave has grown rapidly. Today, the company operates in more than 30 countries. A true fintech unicorn (a startup valued at more than $1 billion), it has processed more than 630 million individual transactions totaling over $31 billion. It counts among its clientele major corporations like Microsoft, AWS, and Uber.
Its growth is a byproduct of its ethos. Since 2016, the company has doggedly stuck to its founding goal of making payments easy and simple for all Africans. And while it seems obvious now consumers and businesses across the continent would be able to move quickly into the modern digital economy, Flutterwave’s early success surprised many market watchers.
“It was a lot of expansion that people did not even imagine possible,” Agboola said. “We’re the largest payment network today in Africa. We have the most licenses in Africa today. We have the most reach in Africa today. But imagine what we require to do that. It’s a lot of work, a lot of expansion, infrastructure initiative, playbooks built, tried, tested, we used, discarded if it doesn’t work. So many of that was done, and I think we’ve learned both the good and the hard way that our thesis makes sense.”
What originally began as a way to fix Africa’s fragmented payments market has evolved into a powerful platform that connects businesses, individuals, and financial institutions across the continent. With the ability to process payments in multiple currencies, Flutterwave has developed a secure platform that enables cross-border transactions and allows African businesses to engage with global markets without the barriers that have long held them back.
But it’s not done yet.
Adapting to Change
Flutterwave’s first clients were large firms with a multinational presence. But as its technology was deployed and the company found purchase with its original base, the leadership team realized it could do more to benefit Africans.
It expanded its services into applications that help Africans in ways that seemed very unlikely back in 2016. Apps like Tuition, which allows African students studying abroad to pay school fees in their local currency, or Send App, the remittance solution that provides an easy and secure way for working Africans to wire money back home to family and friends, have helped the company realize its long-term goals.
As Flutterwave has expanded, it has also helped lead the digital revolution of Africa’s economy. Today, more Africans than ever are using modern services like mobile money and digital wallets.
“We’ve always thought, ‘Our job is to build technology infrastructure, stay in our lane, do our thing, keep it moving,’ but it’s just not that,” Agboola said. “So a lot that we’ve learned as a company, as a team, and we’re still learning as well, but the biggest one for me is we’re learning our customers and we’re focusing on serving them at a scale that nobody would imagine possible in the ecosystem, which was, I’ve seen in recent times, the things that we’ve done, the new Send App that we just relaunched, Tuition that we just built, our Microsoft partnership … but the goal really is we’re learning, we’re growing, we’re evolving.”
