By Chidinma Aroyewun
There is a moment in almost every enterprise sales conversation with a global brand that tells you more about where African fintech is headed than any investor report or panel discussion. It is the moment when the procurement team stops asking about your product and starts asking for your compliance documentation.
When that happens, the conversation has changed. They are no longer deciding whether your platform can do the job. They are deciding whether your organisation is one they can trust with their customers’ money and their own reputation. Those are two very different questions. And how you answer the second one is often what determines whether the deal actually happens.
I spent several years building merchant acquisition strategy for a pan-African payment platform, working to get global brands onto our platform across Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, and the wider African market. The brands we were going after- international airlines, global logistics companies, hotel groups, retail chains- did not make payment partner decisions based on technology alone. They made them based on three things: what your platform could do, what your commercial terms looked like, and whether your organisation passed their institutional risk check. Of the three, the third most often determined whether we won or lost.
