The Saga of Every App Wanting to Become a Bank: Is Fintech the Most Profitable Pursuit in Nigeria?

There is a peculiar pattern in Nigeria’s startup ecosystem. Give a young Nigerian a difficult problem, a laptop, a few developers and perhaps some investors willing to listen, and there is a reasonable chance that the eventual product will somehow involve moving, receiving, saving, lending, investing or converting money.

It is not difficult to understand why: Nigeria has built one of Africa’s most successful technology ecosystems around financial services, producing companies such as Flutterwave, OPay, Interswitch and Moniepoint that have reached billion-dollar valuations.

In 2025, Nigeria alone accounted for about 28% of Africa’s fintech companies, while a 2025 industry report counted more than 4000 companies across the country’s fintech ecosystem.

This is not necessarily a problem. In fact, it is one of the clearest examples of Nigerian entrepreneurship responding intelligently to a real market failure. For years, moving money in Nigeria could be unnecessarily difficult: payments failed, bank transfers were slow or difficult to reconcile, international transactions were complicated, and millions of people and businesses remained poorly served by traditional financial institutions.

Companies such as Paystack made it easier for businesses to accept cards, transfers, USSD and other payment methods, Flutterwave built infrastructure connecting African businesses to local and international payment systems, Moniepoint combined payments with banking, credit and business-management tools, OPay and PalmPay expanded digital payments and financial services through apps and agent networks, PiggyVest made saving and investing more accessible, Cowrywise brought digital savings and investment products to consumers, and Kuda built a digital banking experience around mobile-first banking.

The convenience Nigerians now take for granted when they transfer money, pay a merchant, save digitally or receive payments from abroad did not happen by accident, it was built by intentional design from the hands of creatives and entrepreneurial spirited individuals.

The Money Was Already Moving And Startups Noticed.

The opportunity is enormous because Nigeria is not a small financial market waiting to be digitised. It is a country where enormous volumes of money already move every day, and technology companies have discovered that they do not necessarily need to create the money; they only need to build better infrastructure for it to travel on.

NIBSS data showed that Nigeria’s electronic payment ecosystem processed ₦1.07 quadrillion in transactions over the preceding year, while NIP transaction volumes reached 11.2 billion; separately, electronic payment transactions in 2024 reached 44.8 billion transactions worth ₦3.1 quadrillion, according to Agusto Research.

Those figures translate to an annual average of roughly ₦8.5 trillion in electronic transactions per day, although transaction values naturally fluctuate and the average should not be mistaken for the amount processed on every individual day.

That is the kind of market that makes investors pay attention. A fintech startup does not have to convince Nigerians to start using money; Nigerians are already using it. It only has to convince them to move that money through its infrastructure.

Every transfer, payment, foreign exchange conversion, merchant transaction, card payment, withdrawal, loan repayment or financial service creates another possible revenue stream, and scale can turn tiny fees into enormous numbers.

Moniepoint, for example, says its subsidiaries process more than $250 billion in digital payment transaction value annually, while its platform now provides banking, payments, credit, cross-border services and business-management tools.

This explains something important about the Nigerian startup ecosystem: fintech is not merely popular because founders like finance. It is popular because the market keeps presenting financial problems with measurable commercial value.

But that explanation creates another question. If the ecosystem has some of the most creative young minds on the continent, why does so much of that creativity keep arriving at the same destination?

When Every Problem Starts Looking Like a Payment Problem

Scroll through enough Nigerian startups and a pattern begins to emerge. One promises borderless payments. Another gives businesses access to global payment options and multiple currencies. Another builds payment infrastructure that can sit inside other businesses and even financial institutions.

Another offers savings and investment products. Another provides business accounts, POS terminals and credit. Another wants to simplify remittances. Another wants to make it easier for Africans to receive money from abroad.

Individually, these are legitimate problems. Collectively, however, the concentration becomes difficult to ignore.

Nigeria’s fintech success has created something more powerful than a market: it has created a proven template for startup success. Build around payments; then go on to solve a financial bottleneck, demonstrate transaction volume, grow enough to acquire users, raise enough capital and expand the product beyond local markets. Eventually, before you know it, you’d become the infrastructure everyone depends on or even become embedded underneath somebody else’s business.

The trajectory of some of Nigeria’s biggest technology companies demonstrates how attractive that model can become. Flutterwave reached a $3 billion valuation, OPay reached $2 billion, Interswitch reached $1 billion, and Moniepoint crossed the billion-dollar mark in 2024, making Nigerian fintech companies disproportionately represented among Africa’s unicorns.

There is therefore a rational reason for the repetition. Founders are not blind to opportunity. Investors are not necessarily unimaginative. The market itself is signalling where the money is.

And perhaps that is the uncomfortable part. When one sector repeatedly produces the biggest exits, the largest funding rounds and the clearest path to scale, talented founders will naturally move towards it. A developer building a logistics platform may have to solve fragmented infrastructure, low margins, difficult distribution and expensive operations.

A fintech founder can potentially sit closer to every transaction generated by thousands of other businesses. The question is not whether that is smart. The question is what Nigeria may be losing in the process.

What Are We Not Building Because Fintech Is Easier to Fund?

Nigeria does not have a shortage of problems waiting for technology. Agriculture still struggles with storage, logistics, market access and post-harvest losses. Public transportation remains fragmented. Waste management is a persistent urban problem.

Healthcare records remain difficult to move between institutions. Education technology has barely scratched the surface of what could be built for teachers, schools and students. Manufacturing faces supply-chain and infrastructure constraints. Energy remains a problem large enough to create entire industries around distributed power, efficiency and storage.

There are also less glamorous problems: better systems for local government data, affordable tools for small manufacturers, software for hospitals, agricultural intelligence, construction technology, water management and technology for informal workers who are still largely invisible to formal systems.

The point is not that Nigerian founders should abandon fintech and suddenly start building waste-management software. That would replace one form of herd behaviour with another. The more important question is whether the financial attractiveness of fintech is distorting the allocation of entrepreneurial attention.

If a founder can receive funding for another payment solution more easily than for a technology that improves agricultural storage, the market is not simply reflecting consumer demand.

It is also reflecting investor expectations, regulatory familiarity, successful precedents and the availability of comparable companies. That creates an ecosystem where the next founder can look at the last unicorn and ask, How do I build something like that?

Perhaps the better question is, What problem exists that nobody has built the equivalent of a unicorn around yet?

Nigeria May Not Need Fewer Fintechs. It May Need More Imagination.

There is an irony here. The success of Nigerian fintech may actually be evidence that Nigerian founders are capable of solving extraordinarily difficult problems when enough capital, talent and attention converge on them.

The country did not simply produce financial apps. It built payment infrastructure for a fragmented economy. It created products around the behaviour of informal merchants. It helped businesses accept international payments. It expanded digital access to people traditional banking had underserved. Paystack alone now says more than 200,000 businesses use its platform, while Moniepoint says it serves millions of businesses and individuals.

So the argument is not that Nigeria has too many fintech companies. It is that Nigeria may have too few equally ambitious attempts at solving problems outside finance.

The distinction matters because fintech itself is becoming increasingly sophisticated. The next generation is no longer simply another digital wallet. Companies are building payment rails, cross-border infrastructure, embedded finance, credit systems and financial operating systems.

Flutterwave, for example, now describes its platform as infrastructure connecting banks, cards, mobile-money networks and local payment systems, while its newer banking products push further into the territory traditionally associated with banks.

The irony is that the title of this argument is slightly trying to understand the current reality of startups and its relationship with fintech. This is because every app does not want to become a bank. Every serious startup simply wants to own a piece of the infrastructure through which Nigerians conduct economic life.

And there is a lot of money moving through that infrastructure. The Central Bank of Nigeria's recapitalisation rules now require an international commercial bank to maintain ₦500 billion in minimum paid-up capital, compared with ₦50 billion previously.

A technology company does not need to become a Tier-1 commercial bank to participate in the financial economy; it can build the software, payment rails, merchant infrastructure, wallets, APIs or financial products around the banking system instead.

That may be the real attraction. Fintech offers something rare in Nigeria's startup economy: a problem people encounter every day, a gigantic existing market, measurable transaction volumes, repeat usage and several established examples proving that a Nigerian company can scale beyond Nigeria.

But a successful ecosystem should eventually produce more than variations of its most successful idea. Nigeria has already demonstrated that its founders can build the roads through which money moves.

The next test of the country's creative economy may be whether it can build the systems that move food, people, energy, healthcare, education, manufacturing and knowledge just as intelligently.

The money is already moving. The question is whether Nigeria's best entrepreneurial minds will continue competing to build better ways to move it, or begin asking what else in the country is waiting to move.