Nigerian fintech company Nomba, founded in 2016, initially launched as Kudi, a chatbot designed to facilitate basic financial tasks such as transfers, bill payments, and airtime purchases through messaging platforms. However, founders Yinka Adewale and Pelumi Aboluwarin quickly identified a significant opportunity in catering to businesses. This realization prompted the company's evolution from a simple chatbot into a comprehensive payments platform serving merchants, culminating in its rebranding to Nomba in 2022. Today, Nomba provides an array of tools enabling businesses to accept payments, manage finances, and execute financial operations across both digital and physical channels, serving hundreds of thousands of merchants and processing billions of dollars in transaction volume annually.

Nomba's initial growth was significantly driven by Nigeria's agency banking model. In this system, individuals and small businesses operate as agents, offering financial services like cash withdrawals, transfers, and bill payments via Point-of-Sale (POS) terminals. This model allowed the startup to effectively penetrate Nigeria’s vast cash economy and reach millions of individuals who were either underbanked or entirely excluded from the formal financial system. Over time, however, the company strategically shifted its focus towards the merchants themselves. Currently, Nomba offers a suite of products including POS terminals, payment gateways, business accounts, treasury tools, payroll services, and operational software, all designed to centralize and simplify financial management for businesses.

While Nigeria remains its largest market, Nomba has increasingly looked beyond its borders for growth opportunities. In 2025, the company embarked on an expansion into the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which is Africa's fourth-most-populous country. Instead of introducing a full banking suite, Nomba opted to enter the market through remittances, strategically building a network of physical agents across Kinshasa and other cities. The aim is to manage inflows from major trading corridors such as China and Dubai, with plans to gradually layer additional financial products over time. This DRC expansion is envisioned as a potential gateway for Nomba into the broader Central African region, where large populations still lack access to formal banking systems.

Another critical component of Nomba’s strategy involves facilitating international payments for African businesses, addressing a major bottleneck as more merchants seek revenue opportunities beyond the continent. Many businesses in Africa struggle to collect payments from overseas customers due to expensive card processing fees and fragmented payment systems. To tackle this, Nomba recently acquired a licensed Canadian payment service provider, thereby establishing the necessary regulatory infrastructure to move money locally within Canada and directly connect Canadian dollar flows to African markets. This acquisition not only enables Nomba to serve African businesses trading with Canada but also significantly reduces the friction and cost typically associated with international payments.

Expanding its international payment infrastructure further, Nomba recently partnered with UK-based financial services company Volume. This collaboration allows Nigerian merchants to receive payments directly into their bank accounts through open banking rails. This method bypasses traditional card networks, which often impose processing fees of 6% to 7% on African businesses accepting international payments. Account-to-account payments enable customers to pay directly from their bank accounts, thereby reducing transaction costs for businesses. The impact can be substantial for merchants selling internationally; one early adopter of this integration reportedly received over £5,000 from UK customers within two months of using the system.

Yinka Adewale, Nomba's co-founder, articulates the company's overarching vision: to make global transactions feel local for African businesses, irrespective of the underlying infrastructure, be it open banking rails or stablecoins. This ambition is timely, as it taps into a significant shift in Africa’s economy where more small and medium-sized businesses are actively participating in global trade by selling products online, offering international services, or collaborating with overseas clients. However, the existing financial systems supporting these businesses have often lagged behind. Platforms like Nomba are striving to close this gap, with Adewale emphasizing that the goal is simple: for an African business selling globally, getting paid should feel no different from a local transaction.

Nomba’s strategic focus on the UK payments corridor is heavily influenced by economic realities. The United Kingdom is home to one of the largest Nigerian diaspora populations, estimated at over 270,000 people, a number that has seen a recent increase. This diaspora fuels a consistent flow of money, primarily remittances, between the two countries. Furthermore, trade links are deepening; in December 2025 alone, trade between Nigeria and the UK reached £95.7 million, encompassing eCommerce purchases, subscriptions, professional services, and remittances. For fintech companies like Nomba, this robust activity represents a potentially large and growing market.

However, this strategy is not without its challenges. The UK–Nigeria payment corridor is already a competitive landscape, largely dominated by established financial services players that handle cross-border card payments and merchant services. Additionally, most business financial flows between the two countries are still primarily driven by businesses in the energy sector rather than exports from small African businesses. These factors raise pertinent questions about whether infrastructure designed to help African companies bank globally can scale rapidly enough to justify the substantial investment. Despite these considerations, Nomba appears to be confident that the burgeoning diaspora economy and the expanding digital commerce between Lagos and London will generate sufficient demand, solidifying the corridor's strategic importance for African fintech infrastructure. Adewale underscores that while energy exports are a significant part of the Nigeria/UK trade relationship, they represent only one dimension of a much broader economic corridor, pointing out that Nigerian merchants continue to lose approximately 7% of each transaction’s value due to conversion and card processing fees when selling to UK customers.