South Africa’s largest e-commerce company reported its first annual operating profit in 15 years this week, a surprising achievement against the backdrop of its stiffest competition yet, which the company, like other local African players, is navigating by hijacking the very playbook with which global rivals sought to crush it.

Takealot Group swung from a USD 13 M adjusted operating loss to a USD 11 M profit in the year ended March 2026, according to parent company Naspers. The core Takealot.com platform generated USD 906 M in revenue.

The milestone comes as competition has intensified on every front. Amazon launched its South African marketplace in May 2024 and has been expanding its Prime subscription service with lower-cost delivery. Chinese discount platforms Shein and Temu are estimated to have generated around ZAR 7.3 B in sales in 2024, accounting for more than a third of South Africa’s online clothing market.

Rather than fight a price war it could not win, Takealot chose to borrow from its competitors. The company expanded its marketplace to international sellers, including merchants from China, giving shoppers access to cheaper products and a much larger catalogue.

It also leaned harder into its TakealotMORE subscription programme, which accounted for 27% of gross merchandise value during the year, and turned its logistics network into a standalone business. Takealot Fulfilment Solutions, which offers warehousing and delivery services to external merchants, recorded 93.5% year-on-year revenue growth.

The strategy mirrors moves by Jumia, another African e-commerce giant still pursuing profitability. Jumia opened an office in Yiwu, China’s sprawling wholesale capital, in December 2025.

By September, the platform counted roughly 24,000 China-based sellers and had 2.2 million China-sourced items sitting in its African warehouses. In the first quarter of 2026, the volume of items sold by international sellers on Jumia grew 87% year-on-year. The company’s revenue rose 39% to USD 50.6 M.

The trend points to a broader shift taking shape in African e-commerce, where local platforms are figuring that the battle with Chinese marketplaces may not be won by building a better marketplace, but by plugging into the same supply chains. This has fuelled something of an ironic outcome where Takealot’s best results have come amid the most intense competition it has ever faced.

Nigeria and Kenya built African fintech’s first decade. The argument that they’ll define the second is getting harder to make, suggests an industry operator who has an inside view into where adoption, transaction flows, and market gaps are actually emerging.

Ifelade Ayodele, founder of cross-border payments company Blaaiz, has a front-row view of where the action is actually moving. He moves money across multiple African corridors daily. And he’s convinced the next wave of category-defining fintechs will emerge from some of Africa’s overlooked markets.

African fintech raised USD 640 M in the first half of 2025 alone. The overwhelming share went to the same four markets: Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, and Egypt. Nigeria now hosts over 430 fintech companies, equivalent to 28% of all African fintechs, despite representing just 15% of the continent’s population. Kenya, meanwhile, raised only USD 23 M in H1 2025, compared to over USD 100 M each for its Big Four peers.

Ayodele argues that the conditions that produced transformative returns no longer exist there as margins are compressed, customer acquisition costs are soaring, and the low-hanging fruit has been picked.

“What convinces me this time is genuinely different is the quality of the institutional foundations that are beginning to emerge” across overlooked markets, Ayodele tells WT in an interview. “Historically, fintech companies had to build products while simultaneously solving for regulation, payments infrastructure, customer trust, and distribution. Increasingly, that’s no longer the starting point.”

He points to several markets reaching inflection points that resemble earlier stages of the Nigerian and Kenyan fintech stories.

Ethiopia is perhaps the most striking example. State-owned Ethio Telecom’s mobile money platform, Telebirr, now serves over 54 million users, more than half of the country’s population. In the 2024/25 fiscal year alone, Telebirr facilitated transactions worth over ETB 2.38 T. Cumulative transactions since launch have reached nearly ETB 5 T ( approximately USD 31 B).

The government has laid out a National Digital Payments Strategy and is rolling out a national instant payment system designed to improve interoperability. “We’re moving from market creation to ecosystem development,” Ayodele says. “Historically that’s where some of the most valuable companies get built.”

The Democratic Republic of Congo tells a similar story. Mobile money active users exploded from 8 million to 23 million between 2020 and 2024. The GSMA estimates mobile payment transaction value will reach USD 3.85 B in 2025, reflecting a compound annual growth rate of about 19%.

With 85% of the population unbanked and 90% of transactions happening in US dollars, there is a significant opportunity. Visa recently launched its Visa Pay mobile solution in the DRC, while Onafriq is bridging Visa’s card network with millions of mobile money wallets, including M-Pesa, Airtel Money and Orange Money.

Francophone West Africa presents perhaps the most intriguing opportunity. Nearly 400 million people in the region remain underserved by traditional banking. The BCEAO has created a harmonised payments environment through a shared currency and common regulatory framework, reducing friction across multiple markets.

Furthermore, Visa is deploying USD 1 B across Africa and has identified Francophone countries—Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Benin—as the next frontier. “Contrary to some assumptions, the region is not lagging,” Visa’s Loïc Aplogan said last year. “It’s just a matter of scale”.

***

If Ayodele had USD 10 M to deploy outside the Big Four today, he’d spend most of his time in Francophone Africa. But not on a consumer-facing fintech.

“Consumer products tend to attract attention, but infrastructure tends to capture value over time,” he says. “I would be more interested in the layer that connects institutions, payment providers, lenders, and businesses, making it easier for the ecosystem to scale. The opportunity is not necessarily creating another wallet; it is enabling interoperability.”

That’s precisely what Ayodele is building with Blaaiz. The company started as a cross-border payments app, launched via a Telegram bot in 2023, with Ayodele checking app store downloads obsessively. Today, Blaaiz has pivoted to white-label payment infrastructure serving banks, fintechs, and financial institutions. The company now operates across multiple corridors, supporting trade, remittances, welfare transfers, and mobility financing. It has partnered with PAPSS, Afreximbank’s pan-African payment settlement initiative.

The pivot came from a crucial realisation that “Payments are not fundamentally a technology problem; they are a distribution of trade partnership, liquidity, and trust problem,” says Ayodele.

For a long time, he assumed the winners would be the companies with the best products. “In reality, many of the most successful payment businesses won because they solved the physical and economic constraints around moving value. They built agent networks, managed liquidity efficiently, earned regulatory trust, and embedded themselves into the daily flow of commerce.”

Ayodele also comments on the biggest misconception founders from Nigeria and Kenya have when expanding into newer markets.

“The assumption that digital penetration translates into digital transaction behaviour,” he says. “You look at smartphone numbers and data on the ground and conclude the market is ready for the product you built in Lagos. But cash isn’t a legacy habit in these markets; it’s the transaction medium of people whose livelihoods depend on immediacy, liquidity, and zero transaction cost.”

The fintech operator points out that the founders who’ve actually scaled across Africa didn’t win by replacing cash. “They won by building a functional bridge between cash and digital value, with physical agents at both ends. If your product strategy doesn’t account for the cash-in and cash-out layer, it’s not ambitious, it’s just incomplete,” he reiterates.

***

Where do transactions still break down in ways that would surprise outsiders? Not because of technology, according to Ayodele, who argues that “they break down because liquidity, settlement, and trade flows across the continent remain fragmented.”

Intra-African trade accounts for only about 15-18% of total African trade. More than 80% of trade is still conducted with partners outside the continent. Payment systems were designed to connect African economies to Europe, the United States, and China—not to one another, he explains. Hence, moving money from an African country to Europe can sometimes be more straightforward than moving it to a neighbouring African country.

“The payment message can move instantly. The challenge is ensuring that liquidity, currency, and settlement infrastructure are aligned on both sides of the transaction.”

On the question of whether we are likely to see one African payments market emerge, or dozens of disconnected national markets, Ayodele says, we’re still looking at dozens of distinct national markets. “The regulatory frameworks, currencies, consumer behaviours, and financial infrastructures differ significantly from one country to another. What works in Nigeria doesn’t automatically work in Senegal,” he notes.

But the industry exec also points out that a continent-wide opportunity is beginning to emerge above those markets. “The bigger opportunity lies in enabling trade, business payments, supply chains, and capital flows across markets. In the long term, the real breakthrough may come from a shared settlement layer rather than from trying to make every national market look the same.”

That’s the bet. Not another wallet in Lagos, nor another lending app in Nairobi. But the invisible infrastructure connecting the markets where millions of Ethiopians are suddenly transacting digitally, where millions of Congolese are using mobile money for the first time, where a harmonised Francophone bloc of 140 million people shares a single currency.

Ayodele is steadfast in his view that the next decade of African fintech won’t look like the last one, and that the companies that define it may not come from where one would expect, just as he is convinced they probably won’t be the ones people see, but rather the ones underneath, making everything else possible.

Consumers across Africa will gladly ask ChatGPT to compare prices, check reviews, and plan a meal. Handing that same assistant the keys to their bank account? That’s a non-starter for roughly two-thirds of them.

This is the headache and high-wire act that Paystack is wading into with its latest experiment. Five months after restructuring into a holding company with AI as a strategic priority, the Stripe-owned fintech has unveiled Paystack Index, a tool that lets AI agents like ChatGPT and Claude complete real transactions on behalf of users in Nigeria.

But the trust deficit is well-documented. A Visa study released this month found that while 88% of Nigerian consumers use AI to assist with shopping, only 34% would trust an AI agent to complete a purchase.

In South Africa, that figure plunges to 23%; in Kenya, it’s 29%. Across Egypt, 91% rely on AI for research and price comparisons, but trust in checkout collapses to 38%. Consumers appear to be comfortable with discovery but deeply uncomfortable with delegation, especially when it involves their actual money.

Yet Paystack is betting on getting users to collapse those misgivings entirely.

How Index works—and the questions it raises

Index allows users to buy airtime, send money via Zap, or order food from Chowdeck simply by typing plain-language prompts. Instead of navigating a banking app or merchant site, a user can say “buy ₦500 MTN airtime for 080…” and the transaction processes in the background. The AI parses the intent, verifies permissions, routes the request to the merchant, and settles via Paystack’s infrastructure.

The company says Index does not store card numbers or CVVs, instead relying on its existing payment rails. Users remain “in control of every authorised payment.”

But the product raises uncomfortable questions that Paystack hasn’t publicly answered: What happens when an AI agent misinterprets a request? Who is liable when a transaction goes sideways: the user, the merchant, the AI provider, or Paystack? How does a merchant verify that an AI agent, not a human, has approved a payment, especially given current fraud detection systems designed around human behaviour and device fingerprints?

These questions aren’t far-fetched. The Visa study also revealed that 36% of Egyptian consumers reported experiencing a financial scam in the past year, with nearly half occurring on social media. Fraud is already a pervasive concern. Introducing autonomous agents into that environment invites a new class of attack vectors, including prompt injection, misdirection, or simply AI hallucinations, translating “buy a small gift” into an expensive purchase.

A strategic bet born from a restructure

Index is the first tangible output from TSG Labs, the venture studio Paystack established when it formed The Stack Group (TSG) in January. That restructuring separated its regulated, cash-generating businesses—Paystack payments, the Zap consumer app, and Paystack Microfinance Bank—from the higher-risk experimental work of TSG Labs.

This structure is designed to contain risk. If Index attracts regulatory scrutiny or blows up in some unforeseen way, the financial and operational impact on the core payment business is theoretically ring-fenced. It’s a smart corporate hedge, but it doesn’t solve the fundamental trust problem facing the product itself.

For now, Paystack is framing Index as a learning exercise, not a commercial product. CEO Shola Akinlade says he expects the learning process to take at least a year. The company is rolling it out through a controlled early-access program, initially only in Nigeria, with a curated set of merchants to study early-adopter behaviour.

“If you take a step back and compare the number of people using their browser for commerce and now introducing agents for discovery, you’ll see agents are coming up, and browsers are going down,” Akinlade said.

Paystack isn’t alone in racing toward agentic commerce. Visa has already begun enrolling banks in its Agentic Ready programme, preparing financial institutions for autonomous transactions. Across the continent, companies are betting that AI agents will become a key interface for digital life, and payments need to follow.

But Visa’s data suggests the infrastructure is arriving ahead of consumer trust. Consumers have shown they will use AI to discover products. Whether they will ever trust it to spend their money remains the open question. Index is Paystack’s bet that the line will move.

Chuma Chukwujama graduated from Obafemi Awolowo University in 1996 with an electrical engineering degree and a clear conviction that he did not want to be an engineer. Instead, he walked into a Nigeria where computers were exotic curiosities, banks still ran on paper, and the word “startup” meant nothing to anyone.

Nigeria, at the time, was transitioning from military to civilian rule. That coincided with a period when computers were just becoming a real thing and small banks were trying to figure out how to connect their systems and computerise their operations. Chukwujama stepped into that gap early; one might say he’s been there since the actual Day 1.

Twenty-five years later, his company Xceed365HR counts First Bank, Zenith Bank, Fidelity Bank, Union Bank, and Seplat Energy among its clients. It has grown into a thriving business without raising a kobo of venture capital.

And this month, it launched what it calls Africa’s first “agentic” AI HR platform; software that can autonomously retrieve contracts, run compliance checks against local tax law, process payroll, and dispatch onboarding communications without a human touching a button. Not bad for someone who started out connecting computers for small banks.

The pivot

For the first decade of his career, Chukwujama built whatever clients needed. Payroll systems, school management platforms, SIM card registration solutions for telecoms, the works. Between 2005 and 2015, his team developed bespoke systems across telecommunications, education, and corporate services.

“We were good at it, but we were spreading ourselves thin,” he tells WT. “The pivot to Xceed365HR as a focused, cloud-based product company was the decision that changed everything. It forced us to go deep.”

In 2015, when most Nigerian companies were still wary of the cloud, he decided to stop being a custom software shop and commit to a single product, encouraged by the observation that foreign HR platforms weren’t built for Nigerian payroll compliance, Nigerian tax remittance structures, or Nigerian pension administration. “The localisation they required was either non-existent or so costly that it wiped out the value,” he says.

A near-death experience

The path to that pivot was not smooth. Around 2010, the company was transitioning from on-premises software to the cloud. They evaluated a rapid application development tool with a large global community behind it and decided to build on it. Within six months, they had a product and went live with a major client.

Then things started going wrong. The system became slow, the features they needed weren’t being added, and integrations weren’t working. Eventually, they discovered the vendor had quietly discontinued the product, by which point they had spent three to four years building on it, with multiple clients live on the platform.

“I genuinely considered quitting,” Chukwujama says. “Continuing meant managing clients on a failing platform while simultaneously rebuilding everything and migrating them across. That process took five years. We lost customers during that period.”

What got him through was a decision that no matter what it cost, they would not abandon the clients they had. And, he adds, “the favour of God. I do not say that casually.”

The AI bet

The technology shift that surprised Chukwujama most was neither mobile nor cloud. It was AI. “The capability leap was so steep, and the implications for how software is built and how people work were so immediate, that it forced changes inside our company at a pace that was genuinely difficult to manage.”

In June 2026, Xceed365HR launched Version 3 of its platform, a system the company describes as fully “agentic”. The term has become a buzzword across the industry, but Xceed365HR is using it to describe something specific: software that operates across five integrated layers, covering how employees interact with the platform, how AI agents execute decisions, and how those agents are grounded in each client’s data and each country’s regulatory environment.

An HR executive can now instruct the system through Microsoft Teams in plain language. The platform handles the rest. The company claims V3 reduces the total cost of ownership by 70% compared to global Tier-1 vendors and cuts HR operational expenses by 63%.

Whether that claim survives scrutiny is a separate question. Xceed365HR has not published independent benchmarking data. What is harder to dispute is the client list, which includes several industry giants. Big names such as First Bank, Fidelity Bank, Union Bank, Zenith Bank, Nembe, and Seplat Energy are all live on the platform.

The un-funded founder

What makes Chukwujama’s trajectory unusual is what’s missing: venture capital. In an era when African tech founders are measured by how much they raise, Xceed365HR has grown to millions in annual revenue on zero outside funding.

“What the slower path gave us was domain depth that you simply cannot acquire any other way,” he says. “Ten years of building custom software for Nigerian enterprises across different sectors meant that by the time we built Xceed365HR, we already understood how these organisations actually worked, not how we imagined they worked.”

What does he see in today’s founders? “A confidence that speed to market compensates for that kind of depth. Sometimes it does. But in enterprise software, especially in Africa, where the regulatory environments and operational realities are genuinely different from anywhere else in the world, shortcuts in domain knowledge tend to surface eventually,” he says.

The bigger picture

The Middle East and Africa software-as-a-service market generated USD 18.9 B in revenue in 2024 and is on track to reach USD 41.8 B by 2030, according to industry figures cited by the company. By 2050, one in four working-age people globally will be African. Yet much of the software managing that workforce remains designed for Europe and North America.

“Global providers have largely treated Africa as an afterthought,” Chukwujama says. “Global enterprise software giants have treated Africa as an afterthought,” he said in a separate interview.

Xceed365HR is rolling out Version 3 across Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and the United Arab Emirates. South Africa is next. The company is also launching new services alongside the platform upgrade; one called Early Bird allows employees to access up to half of their earned salary before payday. Another, called Pulse, routes salaries, pension contributions, and tax payments directly to relevant institutions, built on Nigeria’s existing fintech infrastructure.

If he were starting from scratch today with no reputation, no customers, and no capital, Chukwujama says he would go “deep into AI skills from day one.” But he would do one thing exactly the same: “stay focused on the enterprise and on Africa.”

“Africa is where the opportunity is. It is where the gap between what enterprises need and what is available to them is largest. I would not trade that position for an easier market.”

Less than a year after PayPal’s splashy USD 100 M commitment to African digital commerce, the company’s venture capital arm has been shut down, raising questions about how serious the payments giant actually is about the continent it spent two decades ignoring.

PayPal Ventures, founded in 2016 and one of fintech’s longest-running corporate VC outfits, has paused all new investment activity and is winding down operations. The team shrank from more than 10 partners in late 2025 to just two, and the unit now lists no employees on PayPal’s website. Investment bank Jefferies has been hired to explore selling the remaining portfolio positions on the secondary market.

The decision comes as part of a sweeping restructuring under new CEO Enrique Lores, who replaced Alex Chriss in March 2026 after the board deemed Chriss wasn’t moving quickly enough. Lores has announced plans to cut roughly 20% of PayPal’s global workforce, more than 4,500 jobs, over two to three years to save at least USD 1.5 B.

The new leadership has indicated that PayPal is retreating to its core, and it appears venture investing, especially in far-flung markets, is a luxury it can no longer afford.

Africa: a pattern of half-measures

The timing couldn’t be more awkward. Just months ago, PayPal was publicly talking up its African ambitions. In January 2026, the company announced a high-profile partnership with Nigerian fintech leader Paga, enabling Nigerians to link PayPal accounts to Paga wallets and receive payments from over 200 countries.

PayPal’s Otto Williams, SVP and regional head for Middle East and Africa, framed it as a long-term bet, with the company pledging USD 100 M to fuel digital commerce across the region through investments, acquisitions, and partnerships. The fund had already backed regional players like Tabby (Saudi Arabia), Paymob (Egypt), and Stitch (South Africa).

But that USD 100 M commitment was always going to be deployed in part through PayPal Ventures. With the VC arm now shuttered, it’s unclear what happens to that pledge.

The pivot also comes after years of neglect that left deep scars. PayPal restricted inbound payments to Nigeria around 2004 over fraud and chargeback risks, locking African users out of receiving funds while allowing only outbound sends.

That “temporary” restriction lasted 22 years. Earlier attempts to re-enter, including a 2014 partnership with First Bank of Nigeria and a 2021 tie-up with Flutterwave, offered limited, business-only fixes that did little to rebuild trust. A recent uproar from Kenyan users over account terminations also captures the fraught relationship.

A market that moved on without them

While PayPal dithered, Africa’s fintech ecosystem grew into a powerhouse. Kenya’s M-Pesa processes transactions worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Today, Africa accounts for about 70% of global mobile money transaction value.

Nigeria’s digital economy reached NGN 1.07 Q (USD 754 B) in domestic payments volume in 2024, with over 430 fintech firms operating in the space. Local champions like Paystack (acquired by Stripe), Flutterwave, and Paga have scaled impressively in PayPal’s absence. Paga alone processed NGN 17 T across 169 million transactions in 2025.

PayPal’s belated “PayPal World” strategy, which aims to bridge existing local wallets to its global network rather than compete for consumer accounts, looks less like a visionary move and more like a grudging admission that the company lost the wallet war.

PayPal’s retreat also reflects how corporate VC often comes with strings attached, and those strings can be cut the moment a new CEO decides to trim costs. PayPal’s shares have dropped nearly 40% in the past year and over 83% in the past five years. Understandably, it’s hard to prioritise new conquests when a company is fighting for survival in its core markets.

The deeper problem is credibility. PayPal spent two decades telling Africans their market was too risky. Now, having finally made noises about showing up, it’s already pulling back. For a company that built its brand on enabling global commerce, that’s a shortcoming that local competitors might fancy exploiting.

Africa’s top smartphone maker is quietly building a presence in the continent’s renewable energy sector, moving beyond phones into solar power and electric vehicles as its core handset business slows.

Transsion Holdings, the Chinese company behind the Tecno, Infinix and Itel brands, controls about 50% of Africa’s smartphone market. But that dominance is under pressure. In the first half of 2025, the company’s Africa revenue fell 4.45% to CNY 9.65 B (~USD 1.3 B), while handset revenue dropped 18.41% year-on-year.

The company is now pivoting to “new energy” mobility and renewable energy products. Through its Itel and Oraimo brands, Transsion has launched a variety of home solar energy systems designed for African households with unreliable electricity. Its solar products, which are quickly gaining ground in the Nigerian market, provide an economical power solution for regions where many households still rely on generators and burning wood, coal or kerosene for lighting.

In electric vehicles, Transsion introduced its TankVolt brand of electric two-wheelers and tuk-tuks in Uganda in 2023 and has since expanded to Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania and Ethiopia. It later launched Revoo, another electric motorcycle brand, which entered the Nigerian market in 2025. The company now ranks among Africa’s top three EV brands by units sold.

Transsion is applying the same playbook that made it Africa’s smartphone leader, leveraging affordable products tailored to local needs, backed by extensive distribution networks and after-sales support. It is also offering financing options through partnerships with financial institutions.

On Monday, Transsion deepened its renewable energy bet through NewTrails Capital, a Chinese growth-stage fund, in which it owns a stake. NewTrails completed a USD 55 M investment in Spiro, considered Africa’s largest electric vehicle and battery-swapping company. The deal closed Spiro’s latest equity round at USD 270 M, one of the largest single fundraising closes in African clean technology.

NewTrails Capital operates in Shanghai, Shenzhen and Nigeria. It views Spiro as an “infrastructure-like business” and sees the company’s battery-swapping network as part of a broader energy transition across African markets.

Spiro has deployed more than 100,000 electric motorcycles and established over 2,500 battery-swapping stations across seven African markets, including Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, Nigeria and Cameroon. The company has raised about USD 557 M in total disclosed funding.

Transsion’s push into renewables comes as competition in smartphones intensifies. Chinese rivals including Xiaomi and Honor have eroded its lead, particularly in low-end smartphones. The company is seeking a main-board listing in Hong Kong to fund its expansion into electric vehicles, home appliances and renewable energy.

Africa’s electric two-wheeler market is poised for growth. Annual sales of motorbikes are projected to rise from 1.9 million units in 2023 to 2.3 million by 2030. The continent’s EV market is estimated to reach USD 28 B by 2030.

Transsion is betting that the distribution networks and local market knowledge that built its phone empire can now power its next act in renewable energy and electric mobility.

Nigeria’s top fintech companies are reeling as a new move by the central bank to restrict any payment firm from dominating both consumer and merchant markets puts their playbook at loggerheads with the rules and a hard ceiling on their ambitions.

In a circular issued earlier this week, the Central Bank of Nigeria said any licensed financial institution that controls more than 25% of the consumer-issuing market will be restricted to a maximum of 15% market share in merchant-acquiring activities. The restrictions apply to groups of related entities, preventing firms from bypassing the rules through subsidiaries. The rules take effect on December 31, 2026.

Consumer issuing covers services that enable consumers to make payments, including bank accounts, payment cards and digital wallets. Merchant acquiring is the infrastructure that enables businesses to accept payments, including payment gateways, Point-of-Sale terminals and merchant settlement systems.

The move has significant implications for companies like Moniepoint, OPay, PalmPay, Paystack and Flutterwave, many of which have spent years building strong merchant-payment businesses and are increasingly expanding into customer-facing banking services.

Moniepoint controls roughly 38.5% of Nigeria’s POS market, according to industry data, while OPay holds about 27%. Both companies have built massive customer bases by focusing heavily on underserved consumers, small traders and informal businesses.

The new rules come as fintechs make aggressive moves into banking. In January, Paystack acquired Ladder Microfinance Bank, which followed the launch of its consumer payments app, Zap. In April, Flutterwave secured a microfinance banking licence. Both moves were designed to give the companies greater control over funds and deposits, converting payment users into banking customers.

The CBN said the restrictions are designed to prevent excessive concentration in Nigeria’s rapidly expanding digital payments ecosystem, which surpassed NGN 1 Q (~USD 733 B) in 2025. The regulator also cited concerns about systemic risk and the emergence of operators with substantial market presence across key payment activities.

The rule effectively forces dominant fintechs to choose between consumer and merchant markets. A company that controls more than 25% of consumer payments cannot hold more than 15% of merchant acquiring, and vice versa.

For Flutterwave, valued at over USD 3 B, and OPay, valued at USD 2.75 B, the restrictions could force a strategic rethink. Traditional banks could also be affected if they seek to build a substantial market share in merchant acquiring while maintaining their dominant positions in consumer banking.

The CBN has given operators until December 31, 2026, to restructure their operations. Monthly market share reports will be submitted to the regulator for monitoring and enforcement.

As it stands, the era of building across both sides of the payments market may be coming to an end for Nigeria’s fintech giants.

Mobile technologies contributed USD 240 B to Africa’s economy in 2025, equivalent to 7.8% of the continent’s GDP, according to a report released this week by the GSMA, the industry body representing mobile operators globally.

The sector supported roughly 13 million jobs and generated USD 45 B in public revenues through taxes, spectrum fees and license payments. The mobile industry’s economic contribution is expected to reach USD 290 B by 2030 as digital adoption deepens.

But the report also highlights a striking disconnect. While mobile broadband networks now reach most of the continent, nearly 1 billion Africans who live within coverage areas do not use mobile internet. Only about 9% of Africans live outside mobile broadband coverage. The challenge, the GSMA said, has shifted from expanding networks to ensuring people can afford and use them.

The usage gap

Affordability is the primary barrier. Smartphone prices remain out of reach for many low-income households, and data costs discourage regular use despite improvements in coverage. Limited digital skills, online safety concerns and social barriers also constrain adoption.

The report comes as African telecom operators reposition themselves beyond traditional voice and data services. According to GSMA Intelligence research, 79% of operators in Africa now identify becoming a digital transformation partner as a primary objective, deploying artificial intelligence, expanding digital services and opening network capabilities to developers through standardised APIs.

“Africa’s mobile industry is entering a new phase of development,” said Vivek Badrinath, Director General of the GSMA. “Having connected millions of people and businesses over the last decade, the focus is increasingly shifting towards unlocking greater value through AI, digital services and new forms of innovation.”

Operators are expected to spend more than USD 76 B on network infrastructure by 2030. Mobile-enabled services are increasingly supporting financial inclusion, digital commerce, healthcare delivery and education across the continent. Africa remains the world’s largest mobile money market, with millions relying on mobile financial services where traditional banking is limited.

Closing the usage gap, the GSMA said, could unlock significant economic opportunities by bringing hundreds of millions more people into the digital economy.

Three years ago, Swvl was a cautionary tale. The Egypt-born mass transit startup had gone from a USD 1.5 B valuation to a market cap of just USD 9 M, its stock had crashed below USD 1.00, it had just USD 2.9 M left in the bank, and a Nasdaq delisting warning loomed. The company that had once burned through USD 161 M in a single half-year was running on fumes.

Today, Swvl is reporting revenue of USD 8.2 M for the first quarter of 2026, up 68% year-over-year. Its operating loss has narrowed 71% to just USD 174 K, pushing its operating margin from negative 12% to negative 2%. The company is framing itself as “approaching breakeven”. And it is using that improved picture to justify a push into two of the world’s most competitive transport markets: the UK and the US.

Swvl’s struggles had, at one point, made it the poster child for SPAC-era hubris. The company had raised nearly USD 100 M from investors, including Beco Capital and VNV Global. It went public via a SPAC in 2021 at a USD 1.5 B valuation. Then the wheels came off. By December 2023, its accumulated losses had reached roughly USD 329 M. Its operating cash flow burn for the year was USD 9.1 M. Analysts at Wolfpack Research described the company as “a few breaths away from bankruptcy”.

Swvl pulled back. It abandoned its consumer ride-hailing business and refocused on B2B enterprise mobility, providing transport solutions for companies, schools and governments. It cut costs aggressively, trimming operating expenses down to 23% of revenue in Q1 2026, down from 34% a year earlier. It prioritised recurring revenue, which now makes up 88% of total revenue. Dollar-pegged revenue reached 44% of total, up from 35%.

The strategy appears to be working. In FY 2025, Swvl reported net income of USD 1.3 M, its first full-year profit and it entered 2026 with a USD 38.2 M sales backlog. Meanwhile, Egypt revenue surpassed its 2022 peak and GCC revenue more than doubled year-over-year in Q1.

Now Swvl is betting that a leaner cost base and a recurring-revenue model can fund expansion into developed markets. In June 2025, it signed its first SaaS contract in the UK, offering its mobility management platform to enterprise clients. The company has flagged Texas and Chicago as early targets for its US entry, and secured a USD 2 M investment in February 2025 to support US expansion.

It’s an ambitious move as the UK and US are crowded, mature markets with entrenched competitors. But Swvl is no longer selling itself as a ride-hailing app but rather selling software that helps companies manage employee transportation; a B2B play that requires less capital and offers more predictable revenue.

CEO Mostafa Kandil framed the UK contract as “a validation of our platform’s global relevance”. Swvl still has work to do. as it’s not yet profitable on an operating basis. But for a company that was nearly out of cash three years ago, going from navigating survival to chasing scale breeds optimism.