For three years, FlexPay sold Kenyans a fintech fairy tale, offering a save-now-buy-later platform built on the promise that Kenyans did not need more debt, only more discipline, and that the company holding their money in the meantime could be trusted with it.

That promise collapsed on 1 September when detectives from the Directorate of Criminal Investigations walked into Roysambu and walked out with two of Flexitech Group Limited’s own directors in handcuffs. Martin Kariuki Maina and Johnson Gituma Mwangi, the latter a co-founder and the company’s long-serving chief operating officer, are accused of stealing over KES 30 M (nearly a quarter of a million dollars) belonging to an unnamed major retail chain.

According to the DCI, the pair were acting as collection agents for the retailer, receiving funds from customers who had purchased and picked up goods from several branches. Instead of forwarding this money to the company, they allegedly diverted it for personal use.

FlexPay’s entire model relies on trust. The platform offers a digitised version of the old East African lay-by system, letting shoppers pay for a fridge or a school uniform in instalments and collect it once the balance is cleared. It identified as a payment facilitation and savings platform, not a lender. The company offers goal-based savings products and a group savings feature known as FlexPay Chama.

That framing did real work for FlexPay. It let the company sit outside the perimeter that usually catches deposit-takers and digital lenders in Kenya, even as its products did precisely what banks and saccos do: collect money from ordinary Kenyans and promise to give it back at a later date.

By September 2023 the company was telling TechCrunch it had signed more than 600 merchant partners and served over 200,000 customers, part of the pitch that carried it into TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield 200 and, later, into the second cohort of Safaricom’s Spark Accelerator in October 2025.

Long before the DCI arrived, customers were already expressing their frustrations. In July, one customer reached out to a Kenyan blogger, desperate for assistance after waiting six weeks for a KES 13 K (USD 100.00) refund. He had contacted the company repeatedly, but was continually met with promises that his refund was being processed without any clear timeline. By August, another customer shared a similar experience: KES 24.7 K (USD 190.00) had not been returned since July. Because of this delay, she was unable to send her child back to school.

These breakdowns in trust became evident through customer reviews on Google Play, especially leading up to mid-2026. Feedback consistently mentioned withdrawal requests taking much longer than anticipated, and customer support being noticeably lacking. One customer shared their experience of waiting for a KES 15 K (USD 115.00) refund from June, which still hadn’t arrived by July. According to FlexPay’s terms, refunds are supposed to be processed within 14 working days, yet many customers reported waiting for months without any resolution.

FlexPay is not the first Kenyan buy-now-pay-later alternative to run into trouble. The sector has seen some turbulence and also been under pressure over alleged predatory lending, fueling the push for regulation. But this case is less about aggressive lending practices or high interest rates, and more about a company that positioned itself as a trustworthy steward of customer savings, a platform that promised financial empowerment without debt, and whose founders now stand accused of simply taking money that was never theirs to keep.

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Ghanaian fintech Seevcash has raised USD 333 K through the Stellar Community Fund (SCF) and affiliated ecosystem programmes, bringing its total support from the Stellar ecosystem across four awards.

Founded in 2022 by Dawuda Iddrisu, Charles Owusu and Cosmos Appiah, Seevcash is headquartered in Accra, Ghana, with a US incorporation, and provides low-cost cross-border payments and peer-to-peer money transfers for African diaspora communities.

The platform allows users to send and request money and manage funds across borders, using blockchain infrastructure including the Stellar network. The company says it has more than 25,000 users across five countries.

Alongside the funding, Seevcash has launched a Visa card that lets users spend their funds online and in person wherever Visa is accepted, building on its partnership with MoneyGram.

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Nigerian startups Trade Lenda and AirSmat have secured a combined USD 450 K investment from Village Capital’s Africa Ecosystem Catalysts Facility, marking the fund’s entry into Nigeria after backing two Ghanaian startups months earlier.

Trade Lenda, founded by Adeshina Adewumi, is a digital financial services platform that provides business loans, embedded finance, and Sharia-compliant financing to SMEs and farmers. The company says it has supported more than 260,000 customers across five Nigerian geopolitical zones, with women accounting for 66% of its users.

AirSmat, founded by Soji Sanyaolu, is a climate-tech startup that converts agricultural waste into biochar-based fertiliser, improving soil health while generating carbon-market opportunities for farmers. AirSmat will use the funding to complete and commission a commercial factory and expand production.

Africa Fintech Foundry sourced both investments for Village Capital.

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Nomba, a Nigerian fintech founded in 2016 by Yinka Adewale and Pelumi Aboluwarin, has raised a USD 3 M debt facility from CardinalStone Finance to expand its cross-border payments infrastructure in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

Headquartered in Lagos, Nigeria, Nomba provides payment and banking infrastructure that helps businesses accept payments, manage money and move funds across borders. The facility will provide more USD liquidity through Nomba’s banking relationships in Hong Kong and Singapore, supporting trade between Central Africa and Asia.

Nomba currently processes over USD 480 M monthly in cross-border payments and is targeting USD 1 B. It plans to raise another USD 20 M–USD 50 M, while looking to expand into Zambia and Uganda next.

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On Sunday, August 30, a message began circulating across Nigerian social media and messaging platforms, quickly getting serious mileage. It looked official, an “Official Note” from OPay Digital Services announcing that the company would suspend all transactions and account-related services from September 1, 2026, for a “long indefinite break.” Customers were advised to withdraw their funds “as soon as possible.”

Within hours, panic set in and withdrawals spiked. A fintech that serves an estimated 46 to 50 million users across Nigeria, supports over one million merchants and employs more than 7,000 people, was suddenly facing something that looked alarmingly like a bank run.

OPay moved fast. On Monday, it took to X to declare the notice false and inserted app banners notifying users of the falsehood. By Tuesday, it had released a video debunking the rumour. On Wednesday, the company held a press conference in Lagos, its top executives flanked by lawyers, making it abundantly clear that OPay was not going anywhere.

“Dem say we dey shut down September 1, today na September 2, we still dey veri active and transactions still dey go on normal,” said Dotun Adekunle, OPay’s chief operating officer and chief technology officer, speaking in Pidgin. “We dey here, we no dey run wit your money, we dey gidigba.”

But the company’s response went beyond reassurance. OPay has engaged the Department of State Services and the Nigeria Police Force to investigate the source of the false information. It has already commenced legal action against at least one individual.

“Anyone who deliberately engages in similar conduct should expect decisive legal action and the full consequences provided by the law,” said Akinfolabi Rokosu, OPay’s chief legal counsel.

This is not an isolated incident. OPay has faced similar rumours before, in 2024 and again in November 2025, when false claims circulated that it had shut down or that customer deposits had been wiped out. Other major Nigerian corporations, including MTN, Wema Bank and pharmaceutical company May & Baker, have also been targeted by fake shutdown announcements in recent months.

***

Earlier this year, the Central Bank of Nigeria upgraded OPay’s operating licence to national status, along with those of Moniepoint, Kuda Bank and other major fintechs. The upgrade formally recognised that these companies had expanded far beyond their original licence scopes and now operate across all 36 states. OPay, backed by SoftBank and Sequoia Capital and valued at USD 2 B, is preparing for a potential US initial public offering, while also weighing a secondary listing in Nigeria.

Yet for all its regulatory validation and institutional backing, a single piece of fabricated information shared across WhatsApp and X was enough to send millions of customers rushing to withdraw their money.

Olalekan Disu, executive at eTranzact and financial secretary of the Association of Licensed Payment Operators of Nigeria, said the threat goes beyond OPay. “Trust is the foundation of digital payments,” pointing out that when false information about a major player spreads, it does not just undermine one company but discourages adoption of digital payments across the board.

OPay has spent the years since its 2018 launch building a platform that helped millions of Nigerians navigate everything from daily transfers to the cash crisis of 2022 and 2023. Its green agent terminals have become a ubiquitous sight across the country. That infrastructure, and the trust it represents, is now being tested, not by usual regulatory or competitor adversity, but by the speed and reach of misinformation.

The company’s response, involving both state security agencies and the courts, signals that it views this as an existential threat. Rokosu said the action was necessary to ensure accountability and customer protection. But the deeper question is whether any amount of legal enforcement can keep pace with how easily fake news can be manufactured and spread.

OPay is still standing. The false shutdown date has passed, and transactions are flowing. But the episode has exposed a vulnerability that no amount of venture capital or regulatory approval can fully insulate against. In a country where digital finance has become essential infrastructure, the rumour mill is a systemic risk that the industry has only begun to confront.

The post How A Fabricated Notice Nearly Broke A Nigerian Fintech Giant appeared first on WeeTracker.

Kora, the payment infrastructure platform, has joined the International Air Transport Association’s IATA Financial Gateway (IFG), connecting global airlines to Africa’s payment ecosystem through a single, reliable infrastructure layer.

IATA Financial Gateway is the airline industry’s dedicated payment orchestration and management platform. IFG brings together global, regional and local payment partners to provide airlines with the right mix of payment options to maximise acceptance, reduce cost, and better serve customers in every market. Through this integration, airlines and travel agencies using IFG can now accept payments across Africa via Kora, including cards, bank transfers, mobile money, and local alternative payment methods, without having to build or manage multiple complex integrations independently.

Africa is one of the fastest-growing aviation markets in the world. The continent is expected to add more than 300 million new passengers by 2050. Yet global airlines have long faced a fundamental operational challenge when entering African markets: fragmented local payment rails, FX complexity, disconnected settlement systems, and the burden of managing multiple payment service provider relationships across Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Egypt and South Africa. This partnership removes that friction. One connection through IFG gives airlines access to Kora’s full African payment infrastructure, with the settlement reliability and local compliance that enterprise operations require.

Dickson Nsofor, CEO of Kora, said, “Africa is not a market to figure out later. It is a growth opportunity that demands serious infrastructure today. Our partnership with IATA signals that the rails are ready. Global airlines no longer have to choose between expanding into Africa and managing payment complexity. With Kora inside IFG, they get both.”

IATA currently represents over 370 international airlines globally. With Kora now part of IFG, those airlines gain direct access to Africa’s payment stack across all markets where Kora operates.

IATA Financial Gateway (IFG) enables greater flexibility in travel payment processing for the world’s airlines and travel suppliers, helping them build a cost-effective travel payment strategy. Kora’s participation strengthens our ability to serve airlines operating in or expanding across African markets,” said Kamil Al-Awadhi, Regional Vice President, Africa and Middle East. 

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Airtel Africa’s mobile money business processed nearly USD 200 B in transactions over the past year as the telecoms operator expands financial services across 14 African countries, putting it on track for a London listing that analysts say could value the unit at up to USD 10 B.

The company’s Sustainability Report 2026, published on Wednesday, showed that Airtel Money’s transaction value climbed 44% to approximately USD 196 B in the financial year to March 31, driven by microloans, international transfers and merchant payments. The customer base grew 21% to 54.1 million users.

Chief Executive Sunil Taldar said expanding access to financial services and connectivity remains central to the company’s strategy. “Across Africa, access to connectivity, financial services and digital education is increasingly essential to economic opportunity,” he said in the report.

The growth positions Airtel Money for an initial public offering scheduled for the second half of 2026. Analysts at CLSA estimate the unit could raise between USD 1.5 B and USD 2 B at a valuation of up to USD 10 B, a fourfold increase from 2021, making it one of the largest fintech listings on a European exchange in recent years.

The mobile money business now has an EBITDA margin of 50.8%, above the broader Airtel Africa margin of 49.3%, and contributes 20% of the group’s regional revenue. However, penetration remains at only 29% of Airtel Africa’s 184 million mobile subscribers, with significant room for growth in Nigeria, where only 2.7 million customers currently use the service.

Airtel Africa has also expanded its digital infrastructure, with mobile network coverage reaching 81.9% of the population, including 73.1% in rural areas. Smartphone penetration rose to 49.5%, while data customers grew to 84.2 million.

The company’s agent network, which supports financial inclusion and local entrepreneurship, expanded by 39% to 2.4 million agents. Women account for 44.1% of Airtel Money customers, the report showed.

Beyond financial services, the Airtel Africa Foundation connected 3,043 schools to free internet through a partnership with UNICEF, up from 2,176 the previous year. The company also converted more than 950 network sites from off-grid to on-grid power, cutting diesel consumption by 9.1 million litres.

Feature Image Credits: Developing Telecoms

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Nigeria remains the most active fintech market on the African continent. From payment infrastructure players like Flutterwave and Paystack to...

The post How To Register Your Fintech Business in Nigeria appeared first on TechTrends Africa.

Trust has always been the cornerstone of banking. Yet, even as financial institutions accelerate their investments in artificial intelligence (AI),...

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Africa has cemented its position as the global leader in mobile money, processing $1.4 trillion in transactions in 2025, according...

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Kenyans are starting to save more, driven primarily by the need for financial security and the ability to respond to...

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What do you think of when you hear “financial inclusion”, access to bank accounts? It’s more than that! Financial inclusion involves all-around financial services for everyone; however, over 1.3 billion adults worldwide remain unbanked, predominantly in emerging markets across Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and parts of Latin America.? Emerging technologies, particularly Artificial Intelligence (AI) and...

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Cape Town venture capital firm HAVAÍC has secured USD 25 M toward its USD 50 M African Innovation Fund 3, with major backing from financial services group Sanlam Multi-Manager. The fund targets 15 early-stage African tech startups with global potential, focusing on fintech, agritech and other high-growth sectors.

The investment marks Sanlam’s first significant move into South Africa’s VC space, joining existing backers Fireball Capital and the SA SME Fund. HAVAÍC has already deployed capital from the fund, including USD 1 M investments in SAPay (digitising taxi payments) and sports analytics platform Sportable. These join earlier 2025 investments in pan-African payments platform NjiaPay and livestock trading platform SwiftVEE.

The announcement follows several successful exits from HAVAÍC’s portfolio, most notably emergency response tech firm RapidDeploy’s acquisition by Motorola Solutions; one of South Africa’s largest tech exits. Another portfolio company, hearX Group, recently merged with hearing tech firm Eargo in a USD 100 M deal.

With its current portfolio already serving 22 million customers across 183 countries, HAVAÍC is positioning itself as a key player in Africa’s growing VC landscape. The firm plans to continue identifying and supporting African tech entrepreneurs building scalable solutions, with particular interest in businesses that can expand across multiple African markets and beyond. The remaining USD 25 M of the fund is expected to be raised in the coming months.

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Nigeria’s bubbly fintech sector is under fresh scrutiny after the country’s anti-corruption agency uncovered a sprawling identity fraud scheme involving thousands of young Nigerians selling biometric data to digital finance platforms.

According to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), over 12,000 individuals are allegedly harvesting and reselling critical identity information—including Bank Verification Numbers (BVNs) and National Identification Numbers (NINs)—to fintech companies for as little as NGN 5 K (~USD 3.33) per identity.

The illicit trade, described by the EFCC as a “threat to national security,” exposes a troubling weakness in the Know Your Customer (KYC) processes meant to secure Nigeria’s digital financial systems.

In some cases, scammers reportedly pay victims between NGN 1.5 K and NGN 2 K to surrender personal data, including ID photos, address details, and national ID slips. These details are then used to open accounts linked to fraudulent investment schemes, or to launder money via cryptocurrency and microfinance channels.

The alleged fraudsters, often referred to as “Account Suppliers” or “KYC Groups,” have created a black market for verified identities, exploiting the very infrastructure designed to enhance trust and access in the country’s digital economy.

While the EFCC did not publicly name the fintech companies implicated in the ongoing investigation, it confirmed that arrests have been made and that recovery efforts are underway.

The fallout has also reached Nigeria’s National Identity Management Commission (NIMC), which has moved to distance itself from the scandal. In a statement, NIMC’s spokesperson Kayode Adegoke denied institutional responsibility, stressing that the commission had repeatedly warned citizens against disclosing their NINs to unauthorised parties.

“The NIMC will not be held responsible for any personal information shared by an individual directly or by proxy for the purpose of financial gain,” the statement read. The agency encouraged the public to use its NINAuth mobile app to better control and protect their identity data.

Beyond the data-selling racket, the EFCC also flagged a parallel scheme involving malware and phishing. In one instance, victims were lured by a fake airline promo offering 50% off tickets in exchange for a NGN 500.00 “charity” donation. The scam prompted users to download a counterfeit app embedded with spyware capable of siphoning sensitive banking credentials.

Once accessed, victims’ funds were funneled into accounts, often opened with stolen identities, then converted to crypto to obscure the trail.

The revelations cast a shadow over Nigeria’s fintech boom, which has attracted billions in venture capital and positioned itself as a beacon of innovation and financial inclusion on the continent. The EFCC’s findings now raise urgent questions about compliance lapses and data protection standards in the sector.

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Africa’s financial technology revolution didn’t happen overnight, but its speed and general impact in the past 15 years has been – and continues to be – nothing short of inspiring. Over the last decade and a half, the breadth of financial services Africans have access to has been greatly widened, from digital payments processing and seamless global remittances to accessible premium banking services and even crypto investments.

At the start of the 2010s, using debit cards to withdraw cash from Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) was arguably the most impactful financial advancement in many African countries. However, in Kenya, the mobile money revolution was in full swing with M-PESA, which launched a few years earlier and fundamentally affected the landscape of financial inclusion.

With just T9 keyboard phones, Kenyans could deposit, send, receive and withdraw money through a network of agents and retail outlets, services that would typically require trips to bank branches. Targeted at the unbanked population, M-PESA, fronted by telecommunication giant Safaricom, was immediately popular and lauded as “the most successful mobile phone‐based financial service in the developing world.”

The blistering success of M-PESA was an indicator that Africa’s financial services system was in need of inventive approaches to widen possibilities. It also showed that widespread trust – a longtime issue in the sector – was attainable. “What M-PESA really did was to put some doubt into that idea that many of Africa’s unbanked did so because they didn’t trust banks,” economic consultant Gregory Hunpiyah tells OkayAfrica. “It takes a lot of boldness to get people to buy into having a wallet on phones that aren’t smartphones and it paid off.”

Although their contexts are different, there’s correlation between the explosion of M-PESA in Kenya to the breakouts of Fawry in Egypt and TymeBank in South Africa, and the fairly recent ultra-ubiquity of Opay in Nigeria. The premise of making financial services available to unbanked and underbanked populations represents an opportunity that has led to the launch of dozens of products across the continent, while traditional banks have also had to evolve accordingly.

Leveraging the internet as the ultimate technological advancement and coinciding with the rise of smartphone technology, fintech in Africa quickly diversified and has grown more effective over the years.

When Interswitch started operations in Nigeria in 2002, its ambitions as an integrated payment processing platform for businesses and banks was lofty. The process itself was cumbersome, requiring upfront payment and filling of multiple forms. In its evolution, Interswitch offered digital and data solutions to banks, was key to the ATM revolution, launched its own payments card company Verve, and ran the popular payment platform Quickteller. By 2019, Interswitch became the first African fintech company to be valued at $1 billion and earn the unicorn status.

“Interswitch obviously paved the way for Flutterwave, Paystack, HUB2 and these other payments companies,” Hunpiyah says. Late last year, HUB2 closed its Series A investment round, securing $8.5 million in funding as it looks to expand its payment solutions services across French-speaking African countries. Founder Ashley Gauzere said his company is “creating infrastructure and unifying payments in the region like a Stripe-like platform,” referencing the well-known American payments unicorn.

In October 2020, Stripe acquired Nigerian startup Paystack, which had been referred to as “the Stripe of Africa.” The merger and acquisition deal, which was reportedly worth about $200 million, was momentous, further proof that African fintech companies are creating world class products.

“That was the second deal that year that everyone went, ‘Wow!’ It was a little surreal,” Hunpiyah says. Two months before the Stripe-Paystack deal, cross-border payments company WorldRemit announced it was acquiring Sendwave, a remittance-focused company, in a deal worth over $500 million. “Granted, Sendwave operates from the U.S. but its focus is in Africa, and that’s what made the deal possible in the first place.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, dozens of African tech companies received millions of dollars in investments, a show of optimism in a growing ecosystem. That funding spree has slowed down as the limitations of operating fintech startups in Africa have surfaced over the years, including low but growing level of internet penetration, stiff competition and oversaturation, regulatory obstacles, and a few cases of financial mismanagement. With investors, mainly outside the continent, being more selective about who to back, the question of scale and profitability have become more prominent than ever.

“A lot was made out of potential during COVID,” Hunpiyah says. “I think hard lessons were learnt after that and, to be positive, I think it’s shown that African startups can be resilient. Many companies have scaled back and tried new execution strategies to figure out what can work, which is something to write home about.”

Even amidst the market correction, the number of fintech companies in Africa almost tripled between 2020 and 2024, according to a report by the European Investment Bank. It signals a positive future outlook for fintech growth across the continent, as new unicorns are minted and more join the club. Last year, TymeBank and Nigeria’s Moniepoint joined the billion-dollar valuation list, stamping their impact on retail commerce and their role in improving the accessibility of banking services.

In its report, ‘Redefining Success: A New Playbook for African Fintech Leaders,’ McKinsey suggests that fintech revenues could reach up to $47 billion, depending on penetration across the continent reaching 15%. The report also shared six dynamics shaping trends in the ecosystem, including the acceleration of product innovation and fintechs integrating into other verticals. Opay is a great example of the latter, it evolved from the popular browser Opera into a superapp where users can open a bank account just with their phone numbers and carry out a myriad of transactions.

“It’s impossible to miss the impact of fintech companies that have proven themselves by just growing,” Hunpiyah says, referencing MNT-Halan, Egypt’s first fintech unicorn that started as a digital lending service. MNT-Halan has expanded into e-commerce and also offers buy now, pay later solutions.

Hunpiyah concludes that as much as it is about profits, the social aspect of African fintech will always be relevant because “these products are clearly improving quality of life for many Africans.”

As mobile banking adoption surges across Nigeria, users demand faster and simpler ways to manage their money, without switching apps or dealing with clunky interfaces. Xara, a new WhatsApp-based AI assistant, is promising to change that.

Xara, a multimodal artificial intelligence banking bot launched in June by Nigerian software engineer Sulaiman Adewale, allows people to send money, pay bills, and analyse spending as naturally as texting a friend. The bot is built entirely inside WhatsApp, used by 95% of Nigeria’s 31.6 million social media users. 

“I wanted an easier way that carries everybody along in banking, and if you look at it properly, you will see that WhatsApp is what even the oldest people among us use,” Adewale told TechCabal.

The product enters Nigeria’s crowded fintech space with a different approach: cut out the friction and build on top of what consumers already use. The company considers Owo, an AI managed by Mono and designed to facilitate payments on WhatsApp, as its closest competitor.

According to Adewale,  Xara is powered by an existing large language model (LLM), the same underlying technology behind generative AI tools like ChatGPT. It is also trained on images and voices, especially accented Nigerian speech patterns, using open-source data tailored to its specific use case.

The AI understands commands in natural language, interprets them appropriately to confirm details, and processes the transaction in real time. “Send ₦10,000 to Abubakar for breakfast,” a user might chat this with the AI, and it will process.

“We have focused on just pidgin and English, but we are currently working on it to make it even understand our local languages like Hausa and Yoruba,” said Adewale.

To make the AI a personal financial assistant, users add their WhatsApp number, and once onboarded, they are linked to a payment source, currently 9 Payment Service Bank (9PSB), which issues user account numbers. Adewale said the team is working on partnering with more banks, so users can choose their preferred bank.

TechCabal tested the AI bot for two weeks and found that it understands and can process transactions with images, voice notes, text, and can analyse user spending and schedule payments. It remembers conversions with users and is capable of saving recipients as beneficiaries.

About 10,000 users have been registered on the platform, and over ₦135 million ($88,200) worth of transactions have been recorded within the two weeks of its launch, Adewale claims. He added that his team is currently working on partnerships with other banks as its initial payment provider, 9PSB, could no longer handle the inflow of new users, causing it to pause new registrations

Stella Adeboye, a server at Kilimanjaro restaurant in Ilorin, said Xara could serve as an alternative for easy payment for customers who had to raise their heads multiple times to check account details on the wall to make transfers for bill payment.

“If this tool can take a picture of an account number and process the transfer instantly, I think it would help us and also make payments much easier for customers,” Adeboye said.

To its early users, how their personal and financial data are secured has been a major concern. “Being able to bank via WhatsApp without opening another app is convenient, since it works even on a low network connection,” said Babatunde Hassan, one of the users. “But I’m worried about how our information is secured, and I’m sure that doubt may also hold other people back.”

In response to how users’ data is secured, Adewale said that the AI is built to use WhatsApp’s existing end-to-end encryption to safeguard users’ data. This means that conversations are private and inaccessible to third parties. He also noted that it requires an optional 4-digit authentication PIN to authorise transactions to beat fraud or compromise accounts.         

“We don’t retain those personal banking details ourselves; the only data we log is related to payment transactions, just for tracking and resolution purposes, if any issues arise,” he said. “For extra security, we advise users to lock their WhatsApp using Face ID or a password, or even lock their chats with the AI to keep transactions private.”

Adewale explained that in case of a WhatsApp account breach or lost phone, users can visit its customer support to “request that your account be blocked instantly.” Accounts can be reinstated once identification is provided. 

When asked about the type of licensing governing their multimodal AI service, Adewale stated that they currently “rely on banking partners’ license” for regulatory cover, indicating functions through existing compliance frameworks held by its financial institution partners.

A game changer for financial inclusion?

According to the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), over 28 million Nigerians lack access to financial products and services, including money transfer services, despite the country’s financial exclusion rate dropping from 46.3% in 2010 to around 26% in 2023. 

Financial analyst Victor Daniel said leveraging WhatsApp for banking services could encourage even further financial inclusion, especially since the platform works on low-end smartphones despite poor network connections.

“In the past years, fintech innovations have helped reduce the financial exclusion in the country, but we need more innovations like this that can give us more alternatives to traditional systems to achieve more financial inclusion,” he said.  

Daniel added that tools like Xara may also offer a strong alternative to QR code payments, which have seen limited adoption in Nigeria due to technical know-how and fraud concerns. “By allowing users to simply snap an account number from a note or screen and initiate a transfer through natural language, that provides a simpler payment service.”

While the focus is currently on Nigeria, Adewale said he envisions Xara AI banking assistant reaching more African countries where WhatsApp is dominant and banking remains a challenge. He also bets that the tool will disrupt the fintech landscape and “replace a lot of fintechs, hopefully.”  

“We are still working on integrating additional services like savings plans, utility payment, and even e-commerce and logistics, like telling it to order food for you, and it will still do.” 

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Cape Town-based venture capital firm Knife Capital is marking its 15th anniversary with a pair of new Series A investments into South African startups Sticitt and Optique; two tech-driven businesses tackling entrenched problems in school payments and eye care.

Fintech startup Sticitt, founded in 2018 by Theo Kitshof, is digitising school payments while gamifying financial literacy for students. Its platform is used by over 75,000 users across 841 schools and has processed more than ZAR 6.3 B in transactions.

Beyond simplifying how parents pay for school services, the company, which previously raised seed funding in 2022, is positioning its youth banking tool as a driver of long-term financial inclusion. Knife’s investment builds on earlier backing via Grindstone Ventures, with this latest round intended to streamline the cap table and accelerate expansion.

Optique, launched in 2017, is challenging the traditional optometry model with a digitally enabled, low-cost offering. With 19 branches and an online store, the company targets under-served South Africans, offering ZAR 99.00 eye tests, all-inclusive pricing, and interest-free plans.

Founder Leon van Vuuren said the Knife backing will support national growth and bring world-class eye care to consumers left behind by legacy providers.

Knife Capital, which manages three funds, including the newly launched Knife Fund III, says these bets reflect a sharper focus on scalable, impact-driven innovation as it enters its next growth phase.

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In much of Africa, trade isn’t held back by a lack of goods or buyers but stalled by cash flow. Exporters ship products, then wait 30, 60, sometimes 90 days to get paid. Banks, when they show up at all, take weeks to process financing and charge fees that make it unworkable for small firms.

Ghanaian startup Liquify is betting that this friction can be abstracted, standardised, and sold as a scalable asset class.

The company just raised USD 1.5 M in seed equity and additional debt financing to expand its digital invoice-financing platform, which helps small exporters in Ghana and Kenya get same-day cash for unpaid invoices.

Since launching its beta in late 2024, Liquify has financed over USD 4 M in transactions, mostly agricultural and light manufacturing exports headed to Europe and North America, as it pursues a quest to close Africa’s USD 120 B annual trade finance gap.

The pitch is classic fintech: speed, automation, and bypassing banks. Liquify’s platform wraps onboarding, KYC, AML, credit scoring, and settlement into a streamlined process that clears invoices in hours, not weeks.

“The average bank process takes over 10 days and costs more than USD 10 K to serve a single SME,” said co-founder and CEO Nadya Yaremenko, a former Citi exec who managed a USD 3 B trade finance portfolio. “We bring that down to a fraction of the time and cost.”

But what Liquify is really doing is making trade receivables investable. The startup buys export invoices at a discount, offering liquidity to SMEs while giving global investors access to short-term, self-liquidating assets, unlinked from broader financial market swings. Investors get yield; exporters get working capital. Everyone avoids the banks.

Of course, there’s a reason this gap hasn’t been filled. The team has had to build trust with SMEs used to informal lending and persuade foreign investors that fragmented invoice claims from African exporters can function like an asset class.

Co-founder Alberta Asafo-Asamoah, who came from the impact investing world, saw up close how “patient capital” wasn’t fast or flexible enough to scale SME exports. Liquify is taking a more transactional route, one that looks less like aid and more like arbitrage.

With the new funding, Liquify plans to expand its risk and compliance engine, grow into Francophone Africa, and test structured investment products.

Whether African trade finance becomes fintech’s next frontier or just another category of repackaged risk may depend on how well the startup balances local complexity with global appetite. For now, Liquify is betting that Africa’s slowest money problem is also its most bankable.

The post Liquidity Is Costly. Ghana’s Liquify Raised USD 1.5 M To Sell It Cheaply To SMEs appeared first on WeeTracker.

Banking in South Africa just took a sharp digital turn. Lesaka Technologies, the fintech firm formerly known as Net1, is acquiring 100% of digital banking upstart Bank Zero in a ZAR 1.1 B (~USD 61 M) deal.

It’s a rare merger of fintech infrastructure and a full banking license that could redefine how financial services reach underserved customers across the country.

The acquisition—announced via a late-night social post by Bank Zero chairman and ex-FNB CEO Michael Jordaan—is being paid for in a mix of Lesaka shares and up to ZAR 91 M in cash.

The deal gives Bank Zero’s shareholders a 12% stake in Lesaka and signals a strategic pivot. Lesaka, having made its name providing fintech rails, now wants to own a bank, too.

Founded in 2021 by Jordaan and banking veteran Yatin Narsai, Bank Zero has quietly built one of the most radically low-cost banking platforms in South Africa.

Its digital-first, zero-fee model has attracted more than 40,000 funded accounts and ZAR 400 M in deposits, without a physical branch in sight. Its patented card technology, which offers separate numbers for different transaction types, is one of many innovations designed to limit fraud and put control back in the hands of users.

But while Bank Zero focused on design and compliance, it lacked scale. Lesaka, on the other hand, has deep distribution across consumer and merchant segments, including a presence on both the Nasdaq and Johannesburg Stock Exchange.

The pitch is synergy: embedded lending, cross-sell, operational leverage. But the real story is about control—of data, of deposits, and of destiny.

By absorbing Bank Zero’s banking license and tech stack, Lesaka gets to escape its dependency on third-party banks. That opens the door to better margins on lending, a tighter loop on customer behaviour, and more regulatory flexibility. It’s also a bet on long-term infrastructure over short-term fintech flash.

Jordaan and Narsai will stay on, and no layoffs are expected following a move that may well signal what the future of South African finance could look like—digitally native, vertically integrated, and built for people who have never truly had a bank that worked for them.

The post SA’s Bank Zero Vowed To Kill Fees—Now It’s Being Acquired To Reinvent Them appeared first on WeeTracker.