On January 5, 2026, Flutterwave, recognized as Africa’s largest fintech company, finalized a significant acquisition of Mono, a prominent open banking startup based in Nigeria. The deal, reportedly valued between $25 and $40 million, has far-reaching implications that extend beyond a simple infrastructure play, fundamentally altering the competitive dynamics within Nigeria’s burgeoning fintech ecosystem. The core reality of this acquisition is that one of Africa’s largest payment processors now holds control over the crucial API infrastructure upon which many of its rival fintech companies depend to operate.

Mono’s infrastructure is deeply embedded in the operations of Nigerian digital lenders and various financial applications. According to Mono CEO Abdulhamid Hassan, almost all Nigerian digital lenders rely on the company’s APIs for essential functions such as assessing creditworthiness and initiating bank payments. Mono boasts an impressive reach, having powered over 8 million bank account linkages, which translates to approximately 12% of Nigeria’s banked population. Furthermore, it has delivered an astounding 100 billion financial data points to lending companies and processed millions of direct bank payments. Its customer base includes major players like Visa-backed Moniepoint and GIC-backed PalmPay, both of which offer lending products that require the credit-scoring and account-verification APIs that Mono provides, although the precise extent of their reliance on Mono versus alternative solutions remains somewhat ambiguous.

Open banking, at its essence, facilitates the secure, consent-based sharing of financial data—including account balances and transaction histories—with authorized third-party providers such as fintechs and other banks, all accomplished through APIs. These open banking APIs serve as the foundational "plumbing" of digital finance, eliminating the need for every fintech to establish direct connections to individual banks. Instead, companies like Mono offer shared conduits that efficiently transfer data and payments across dozens of banks and hundreds of applications. Mono specifically connects to over 50 banks, enabling businesses to access aggregated, customer-permissioned financial data, streamline payments, and verify identity and account ownership, which underscores its critical role for numerous lenders and payment apps.

While Mono has emerged as a dominant force, the Nigerian open banking landscape has seen other players. Okra, a pioneering Nigerian open-banking API startup, had raised approximately $16.5 million but ultimately decided to cease operations in May 2025, returning between $4 million and $5.5 million to investors. Okra’s exit significantly reduced competition among Nigerian open-banking providers, thereby solidifying the market position of Mono and similar entities. Another notable player is OnePipe, a Nigerian embedded-finance startup that aggregates APIs from banks and fintechs. OnePipe secured a $3.5 million seed round to assist banks in their digitization efforts and foster partnerships with fintechs. However, OnePipe distinguishes itself as being closer to a banking-as-a-service or embedded finance platform rather than a pure open banking data aggregator like Mono. Intriguingly, OnePipe founder Ope Adeoye indicated that OnePipe "aggregates its APIs via partnerships with direct bank APIs and third-party APIs like Mono," suggesting that certain OnePipe-powered products might ultimately depend on Mono’s underlying infrastructure. Should this architectural reliance persist post-acquisition, even OnePipe could, to some extent, find itself reliant on infrastructure now under Flutterwave’s ownership.

For fintechs in Nigeria that directly compete with Flutterwave, the acquisition of Mono presents an uncomfortable strategic dilemma regarding their choice of an Open Banking API provider. They face a trade-off: either integrate with Mono, the market leader now owned by their biggest competitor, or opt for smaller players that may offer thinner coverage and less reliable uptime. Mono’s services encompass data sharing, account verification, and bank payments, meaning every identity check, balance lookup, or payment facilitated through its platform represents a potential billable event. The inherent difficulty and cost associated with switching providers is substantial, with developers and founders routinely describing the re-integration of these critical flows across KYC, data, and payments as a process spanning months within embedded-finance contexts. This creates a powerful long-term lock-in effect for Mono’s existing customer base.

This situation casts a long shadow, reminiscent of the attempted acquisition of Plaid by Visa in the United States. In January 2020, Visa had agreed to acquire Plaid, a data aggregator and open banking platform whose APIs connect popular apps like Venmo, Chime, and Wise to users’ bank accounts, for $5.3 billion. However, later that same year, in November 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a lawsuit to block the purchase, ultimately compelling both parties to terminate the merger agreement before trial. Visa had contended that Plaid was complementary, not competitive, arguing that Plaid’s data pipes would support innovation. The DOJ, however, strongly disagreed, asserting that the merger "would extinguish a nascent competitor, further entrench Visa’s dominance in the online debit market, and harm consumers." This move was explicitly framed as a consumer protection measure. The DOJ’s establishment of a dedicated fintech unit within its antitrust division underscored a more aggressive stance on future payments and data-aggregation deals. Crucially, the DOJ’s complaint cited Visa CEO Al Kelly’s internal characterization of the acquisition as an "insurance policy" to neutralize "a threat to our important US debit business" as clear evidence of anti-competitive intent. By targeting an infrastructure player like Plaid, the DOJ unequivocally signaled that control over consumer financial data pipelines is a paramount competition issue, not merely a matter of privacy or security. The Visa-Plaid breakup set a precedent, marking one of the clearest statements that U.S. antitrust enforcers would actively protect potential future competitors, not just current rivals, in the rapidly evolving digital payments market.

In stark contrast to the U.S. regulatory environment, Nigeria only finalized its open-banking Operational Guidelines in 2023, with full implementation scheduled for August 2025. These guidelines primarily focus on critical aspects such as consent, licensing, and security. However, they remain notably silent on the significant implications when a core infrastructure provider like Mono is acquired by a dominant player, or, indeed, if it were to shut down. There are currently no explicit, Plaid-style safeguards in Nigeria governing potential infrastructure monopolies or mandating data-handover protocols in M&A scenarios. This regulatory void is precisely what the Flutterwave-Mono acquisition now exposes, leaving a significant gap in oversight.

Flutterwave has publicly stated that "Mono will continue to operate independently, with no changes to its leadership structure, team, or day-to-day operations," further elaborating that its stake brings "strategic alignment rather than operational control." The intention, they claim, is to allow Mono to maintain its innovation pace while contributing its open banking infrastructure to Flutterwave’s broader payments ecosystem. However, a critical question arises: what does "strategic alignment" truly entail for a bank or fintech that competes directly with Flutterwave on payments but relies on Mono for essential data and Account-to-Account (A2A) payments? Who will dictate pricing and the feature roadmap when both Flutterwave and another large client require the same capability? Disturbingly, there is a conspicuous absence of any mention of "Chinese walls," data-segregation policies, or independent governance structures designed to protect competitively sensitive information in any of the public materials. This omission leaves rival fintechs in a state of uncertainty, guessing how "strategic alignment" will ultimately influence pricing, feature prioritization, and their long-term dependence on an infrastructure layer now owned by their direct competitor.

Analysts, pointing to the shutdown of Okra, argue that unlike more mature markets where regulators enforce robust data-governance and exit plans, Nigeria’s nascent open-banking regime has yet to demonstrate its capacity to manage the systemic risks inherent when an infrastructure provider changes hands or fails. With Okra no longer a factor, Mono’s acquisition positions Flutterwave as the owner of the only open-banking platform operating at a true national scale in Nigeria, while OnePipe primarily focuses on bank-partnership embedded finance. The absence of an obvious alternative with comparable coverage of Nigerian banks and digital lenders is a significant concern. This deal, according to observers, "signals a broader inflexion point for African fintech, where startups that once aspired to become standalone giants may increasingly find better outcomes by integrating into scaled platforms." For new infrastructure entrants, the challenge is particularly daunting: they require multiple bank integrations to attract clients, yet cannot justify the substantial cost of those integrations without a robust client base. This is further exacerbated by competing against Flutterwave, which possesses the strategic advantage of bundling payment processing with discounted access to Mono’s APIs.

Mono’s Abdulhamid Hassan has previously articulated that "If the economy is going to be credit-driven, you need deep data intelligence to know how people earn and spend." Therefore, if this critical data intelligence flows through pipes owned by Flutterwave, the underwriting logic of every digital lender risks becoming at least partially transparent to a dominant payments rival that occupies positions both above and below them in the financial technology stack. Flutterwave explicitly aims to leverage its Mono acquisition to build something akin to "the operating system for African trade," as detailed on its Mono acquisition microsite. TechCrunch and other sources confirm Flutterwave already "powers local and cross-border payments in over 30 African countries," and Mono enables the integration of onboarding, identity verification, account verification, risk assessment, and bank-to-bank payments into a unified stack. While Nigeria’s Operational Guidelines for Open Banking, fully implemented in August 2025, do promote competition and standardized APIs, they remain critically silent on the consequences when a central piece of this infrastructure is acquired by a dominant entity or quietly discontinues operations. This raises the fundamental question of whether the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) will eventually recognize and treat open-banking providers as systemically important infrastructure, necessitating special rules concerning ownership, pricing, and data portability. Can rival fintechs realistically absorb the immense burden of building in-house API stacks to circumvent Mono, or does the complexity of bank integration and compliance make this an unviable option? Is OnePipe, with its bank-partnership model, the sole credible domestic alternative, and can it expand its coverage to match Mono’s rapidly enough? The pertinent question is not whether Flutterwave will exploit its newfound control over this vital infrastructure; rather, it is whether African fintechs and their regulatory bodies can afford the profound risk of waiting to find out. As the analogy aptly puts it: when the plumber also owns the water supply, everyone else is simply renting pipes.