This is Follow the Money, our weekly series that unpacks the earnings, business, and scaling strategies of African fintechs, financial institutions, companies, and governments. A new edition drops every Monday.
Over the past decade, the playbook for Nigerian fintechs has been remarkably consistent: build payment products, acquire merchants, scale transaction volumes, obtain microfinance bank licences, expand into lending, and eventually launch savings products.
The result is an industry in which some of the country’s largest financial technology companies now operate across multiple layers of the financial system. They issue wallets, acquire merchants, process transactions, provide payment terminals, lend to businesses and, increasingly, operate regulated financial institutions.
This strategy has helped drive rapid growth of Nigeria’s electronic payment industry, which processed ₦1.2 quadrillion ($880.51 billion) worth of transactions in 2025, according to the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).
Now, the CBN wants to rewrite the rules that enabled that expansion.
