Luno, the cryptocurrency platform that started out in South Africa over a decade ago, has launched a structured prediction markets product in Nigeria. The feature allows customers to bet on whether the price of major cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum will go up or down on any given day. Winners are paid in USDC, a stablecoin pegged to the United States dollar.

The move is the latest sign that prediction markets, a type of trading once confined to specialist forums and political betting sites that allows people to stake on just about anything (from major real-world events to random niche interests), are gaining ground in the continent’s economic heavyweight.

Luno’s product, powered by a firm called Limitless, focuses purely on price movements. Users do not buy the underlying asset. They simply predict if the price will be above or below a set level when the market settles at the end of the day.

Luno Nigeria CEO Ayotunde Alabi said the company is seeing a shift in how locals want to interact with crypto. Many users already follow charts and news closely, forming strong views on where prices are headed. The new feature gives them a structured way to put those views to work.

Luno is not alone in eyeing this space. Bayse Markets, a startup previously known as Gowagr, is also active in the local prediction markets arena, looking to reprise the rise of global players like Polymarket and Kalshi, amid ongoing debate about the regulation of a fledgling industry that critics have described as gambling in finance garb.

Nigeria remains one of the world’s most active crypto markets. A PwC report released in January noted that digital assets are now a major driver of adoption in the economy, with young, tech-savvy users pushing momentum deeper. Inflation and currency instability have made alternative financial tools attractive to everyday Nigerians, not just hardcore traders.

Luno is framing the product as educational. The company plans to offer “Learn and Earn” content explaining how markets work. It has also built in safeguards. Users must move funds into a separate wallet to participate. They cannot hold both sides of the same bet. And they have to acknowledge a risk disclosure before they start.

If a prediction is wrong, the customer loses all the capital they put in. That binary outcome is what makes these products different from holding assets long term. It is also what makes them appealing in an environment where quick returns are often prioritised over steady growth.

The broader shift reflects a maturing user base. For years, crypto adoption in Nigeria was largely about buying and holding or moving money across borders. Now platforms are rolling out more sophisticated tools. Busha has expanded into lending. Roqqu launched futures trading late last year. Luno itself has been pushing into staking and tokenised US stocks.

What remains unclear is how regulators will view this new wave of products. Nigeria’s Securities and Exchange Commission has been working to create clearer rules for digital assets. The Stakeholders in Blockchain Technology Association of Nigeria said in January that regulatory certainty and the adoption of stablecoins would be crucial for the sector in 2026.

Prediction markets, with their clear binary outcomes and daily settlements, may fit neatly into a regulated framework. Or they may attract closer scrutiny.

Luno’s launch gives thousands of Nigerian users a new way to engage with prices they already watch. And with the wave of interest in the space, activity and competition are likely to heat up.


Feature Image Credits: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images

Nigerian musicians generated more than 30 billion streams on Spotify in 2025. Their earnings from those streams crossed NGN 60 B (approximately USD 44 M) for the first time. The numbers, released in Spotify’s annual Loud & Clear report, paint a picture of an industry on a rocket-powered trajectory.

But beneath the headline figures lies a math problem that troubles industry insiders.

One million streams on Spotify in Nigeria pays an artist approximately USD 300, one prominent industry figure revealed last year. The same million streams in Sweden pays up to USD 10 K, revealing a gap of more than 3,000 percent.

Spotify does not pay a flat rate per stream. The company operates a territorial model where subscription fees determine royalty pools. In Nigeria, a monthly premium subscription costs NGN 1.3 K, roughly USD 0.82. In Sweden, where Spotify is headquartered, the same subscription costs USD 13.8. In the U.S., it costs USD 12.99.

Revenue pools in each country are divided among artists streamed there. A listener in Lagos contributes to a smaller pool than a listener in Stockholm. When a Nigerian artist is streamed in Lagos, the payout reflects Nigerian subscription economics. When the same artist is streamed in Stockholm, the payout reflects Swedish economics.

Muyiwa Awoniyi, manager of Grammy-winning singer Tems, laid bare the arithmetic in an interview last year. “If my IP is anchored to a region where one million streams is USD 300.00, I am cooked,” he said.

Spotify’s 2025 Loud & Clear report shows Nigerian artist revenue grew more than 140 percent over two years. Independent artists and labels claimed 58 percent of all royalties generated by Nigerian musicians on the platform . Local consumption of Nigerian music jumped 170 percent year-on-year.

These are genuine gains. But they are gains within a system where the ceiling is lower than floors elsewhere.

Media expert Akíntúndé Babátúndé has previously framed the challenge bluntly: even an artist with 10 million fans in Nigeria could earn less than someone with 1 million fans in a high-income country. This is not about musical quality, he stressed. It is about the economic reality of audiences whose limited financial power restricts their ability to support artists through subscriptions, data purchases, or live events.

Some artists are finding a workaround. Nigerian migration patterns mean significant diaspora populations in Sweden, the Netherlands, the United States, and Britain. When Nigerians abroad stream homegrown music, those streams register in higher-paying territories.

This creates an odd dynamic. An artist’s success in wealthy markets often depends less on winning over local listeners than on Nigerians living there. The streams happen in Stockholm, but the audience remains Nigerian.

Spotify’s report noted that Nigerian artists were featured in nearly 320 million user playlists globally. The platform does not break down where those playlists originate. But the diaspora effect is visible in the data.

Spotify paid the music industry more than USD 11 B in 2025, with lifetime payouts reaching USD 70 B. More than 13,800 artists generated at least USD 100 K from the platform alone. Nigerian artists are increasingly part of that middle tier.

The question is whether they can climb higher without leaving home.

Babátúndé argues that artists have a stake in Nigeria’s broader economic health. “The growth of the creative industry depends on people being able to afford subscriptions, buy data, attend shows, and support their favourite artists without breaking the bank,” he said. His warning to musicians: if your fans stay broke, so do you.

For three days in March, Lagos’ Landmark Event Centre was meant to be the epicentre of Africa’s creator economy. Mainstack, the sleek upstart positioning itself as the “operating system” for digital entrepreneurs, had poured resources into curating Moment 2026, an inaugural conference featuring panels, workshops, and a premium experience for over 4,000 attendees.

Instead, the conference delivered one of the messiest public feuds the Nigerian tech scene has seen this year.

Days before the event, attendees noticed something odd. Large, eye-catching billboards dotted the venue, carrying motivational taglines like “Create with intention” and “Create what sells,” each prominently featuring the logo of Selar, Mainstack’s biggest rival.

Selar CEO Douglas Kendyson later explained they’d disclosed the competitive nature to venue operators, who approved the placements after vetting. It was supposed to score points as classic guerrilla marketing, inserting Selar’s brand into a competitor’s spotlight without saying a word.

But Mainstack saw red and lodged complaints. Then the billboards came down. What could have ended as a cheeky anecdote instead exploded on X when former Selar Chief Marketing Officer Milton Tutu was unveiled as Mainstack’s new CMO right there at the event.

Tutu had spent four years at Selar, helping scale it from modest numbers to a continental force. When he announced his exit in October 2025 via a heartfelt Medium post titled “Leaving Selar, Not the Mission,” the departure appeared amicable. Then came Kendyson’s thread.

“He was fired,” Kendyson claimed on X, adding that concerns over Tutu’s team management and leadership style were a factor, in what was a bombshell response to a wave of near-identical posts he labelled a “cheap coordinated PR attack.” Screenshots showed multiple users tweeting variations of switching over to Mainstack with Tutu.

Kendyson added he’d given his blessings about Tutu’s new position when Mainstack called in December 2025, making the “scripted” campaign feel like a betrayal.

But Tutu, in a Medium response posted Monday, pushed back. “I’ve also heard claims that I was fired from Selar. While multiple factors influenced my exit, the final and only official documentation that marked my exit from the company is my resignation letter, which was acknowledged by the leadership team,” he wrote.

Selar, founded in 2016 by a former Paystack and Flutterwave engineer, has positioned itself as the reliable infrastructure of African creator monetisation. With over 2 million users and more than USD 26 M in payouts to creators, it remains the market incumbent. In 2025 alone, Selar says it paid out over NGN 18 B (USD 12.86 M) to nearly 400,000 creators.

Mainstack, founded in 2022 by Ayobami Oyaleke and Olamide Akinola, takes a different approach. It markets itself as an all-in-one aesthetic-heavy platform combining link-in-bio tools, booking calendars, and global payments; a lifestyle product for the modern digital entrepreneur.

Both are chasing a prize that’s only getting bigger. Africa’s creator economy is projected to grow from roughly USD 5 B in 2025 to nearly USD 30 B by 2032.

Reactions on X captured the divide. One user, Queens, cut through: “This is competition. Like Burger King v McDonald’s, Coke v Pepsi style. It’s done all over the world. It’s not some ‘friendly Kumbaya, let’s all get along’ vibe”.

Others were less charitable. Meanwhile, some industry observers urged de-escalation, noting Tutu had never spoken ill of Selar publicly.

For attendees, the drama likely overshadowed some sessions. But it also firmed up the reality that African creator economy is maturing, and with maturity comes competition. Talent poaching, event hijacking, and social media mudslinging become weapons when differentiation is tough. Whether it fuels better products or just more tweets remains to be seen.

Launching an e-commerce business involves many moving parts. You need to think about product sourcing, website design, logistics, and marketing. Yet one of the most important steps is often overlooked until the last minute: setting up your payment gateway.

Your ability to accept online payments quickly can determine how fast your online store begins generating revenue. If payment gateway integration takes weeks or requires complicated technical work, you risk delaying your launch and losing early customers.

This is why many merchants prioritise e-commerce payment gateways with a fast setup process. 

This article will guide you in choosing the right payment gateway so you can start accepting digital payments without unnecessary delays.

What an E-commerce Payment Gateway Does

An e-commerce payment gateway is the technology that enables your customers to complete an online payment on your website or digital store.

When a customer places an order, the gateway securely sends the payment information to the appropriate financial networks. The payment processor then verifies the transaction, confirms the payment details, and determines whether the online transaction is approved.

In simple terms, the payment gateway acts as the bridge between your customer’s payment method and your e-commerce business’s payment system.

Features That Enable Fast Payment Gateway Setup

If you are searching for the best payment gateway for ecommerce with fast setup, here are the key features to consider:

Simple Merchant Onboarding

A good payment gateway should make it easy for you to create your merchant account and activate your payment system without unnecessary delays.

Look for providers that offer well-documented onboarding processes, clear setup guides, and a simple checklist of requirements. 

It is also important to choose a payment service provider with transparent pricing. Some gateways charge monthly fees, while others charge per transaction.

Easy Website Integration

Another important factor is payment gateway integration. With the right gateway, you can connect your payment system to your website without extensive development work.

Modern gateways provide plugins and APIs that make payment integration simple for popular platforms such as Shopify Payments, WooCommerce, or custom websites.

 This improves the overall user experience and ensures customers can complete their online transactions smoothly.

Hosted Checkout Pages and Payment Links

Some payment gateways offer a hosted checkout page, where customers can securely enter their payment details to complete a transaction.

You can also generate payment links and send them through email, messaging apps, or social media. 

This allows you to start accepting payments even before your online store or full payment integration is complete.

Payment Methods Your Gateway Should Support

Fast setup should not come at the cost of limited payment options. The right payment gateway should support multiple payment methods so your customers can pay however they prefer.

Research shows that more than 70% of online shoppers abandon their purchases when their preferred payment method is unavailable, underscoring the importance of flexible payment systems for e-commerce.

Across Southern Africa, the most common payment methods include:

Mobile payments and mobile money

Mobile money remains one of the most widely used digital payment systems in Sub-Saharan Africa. The region processes over $1 trillion in mobile payments annually, making it the global leader in mobile money adoption.

Card payments

Many consumers still rely on debit and credit cards for online purchases, particularly for cross-border purchases and global commerce. Visa and Mastercard are the most popular networks for secure card payments across Southern Africa.

Bank transfers

In South Africa, bank transfers are widely used for online purchases. Instant EFT accounts for about 25–30% of e-commerce transactions, allowing customers to complete payments directly from their bank accounts.

Because customers do not need to enter card details, many people see this option as safer and more trustworthy. It also helps reduce the perceived risk of online fraud.

The Best Payment Gateway for Southern African Businesses

If you operate an online commerce platform across Southern Africa, choosing a payment gateway that understands regional payment processing infrastructure is particularly important.

Platforms such as Zoyk demonstrate how a payment gateway can combine fast setup with reliable infrastructure designed for the SADC region.

Zoyk allows you to accept mobile payments, card payments, and bank transfers while managing every transaction through a centralised dashboard.

Its payment gateway supports simple API integrations, hosted checkout pages, and shareable payment links, allowing businesses to begin collecting online payments quickly. 

The platform also operates on secure, PCI DSS–aligned infrastructure with encryption and fraud monitoring to help protect sensitive payment data.

As Zoyk’s Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Clive Nabale explains, consolidating payment processing, reporting, and settlement into a single payment solution, platforms like Zoyk help businesses simplify commerce operations while maintaining visibility into their transactions.

Conclusion

In modern commerce, speed matters. When your payment gateway setup is quick and reliable, you can launch your store faster and start accepting payments without unnecessary delays.

A strong payment gateway should provide fast onboarding, accommodate your customers’ preferred payment methods, offer secure payment processing, and deliver a seamless user experience.

Zoyk is a great example of a modern payment gateway that can support a faster launch while providing your e-commerce business with tools to manage payments, monitor transactions, and scale your operations.

There’s a troubling irony hitting Africa’s largest oil producer right now; the same Gulf crisis that has pushed global crude prices above USD 100.00, a windfall that should fill Nigeria’s coffers, is instead emptying the pockets of its citizens.

While economists calculate potential gains, workers in Lagos, Abuja and Kano are doing simpler math. Petrol now sells for between NGN 1.2 K and NGN 1.45 K per litre in many areas, up from around NGN 774.00 just weeks ago. Transport fares have quadrupled for commuters travelling from satellite towns into the capital. Some workers tell reporters they’re spending over 80% of their salaries just getting to their jobs.

“The current crisis is unprecedented in recent history,” Olowoyo Gbenga, secretary of the Nigeria Civil Service Union, said this week. “Commuting costs have quadrupled. For workers from satellite towns, it is almost impossible to reach work without spending the bulk of their salary on transport alone.”

How Oil Wealth Became a Burden

So why don’t higher oil prices mean cheaper things for Nigerians? Ola Oyetayo, CEO of Verto, a B2B fintech platform specialising in cross-border payments, FX, and multi-currency accounts, explains the contradiction in straightforward terms.

“Over the last 12 months or so, there has been a clear decoupling between global crude prices and Nigeria’s FX market,” Oyetayo tells WT.

Think of it this way: Nigeria still exports crude oil, sure. But the country also imports most of its refined petrol despite producing the raw stuff.

So when global tensions spike and oil prices jump, refined fuel costs rise immediately. Dangote Refinery has adjusted its prices multiple times within weeks, with retail petrol potentially heading toward NGN 2 K per litre if the crisis persists, according to industry warnings.

“The immediate short-term impact on higher oil prices will be an uptick in inflation due to high pump prices feeding into the food and agriculture sectors because of higher transportation costs,” Oyetayo explains.

To illustrate, farmers need diesel to move tomatoes and peppers to cities. When diesel hits NGN 1.62 K per litre, everything gets more expensive before it reaches one’s plate. The federal government acknowledged this week that the crisis is already driving up prices of fuel, diesel, cooking gas and fertiliser.

Oyetayo notes this creates a delicate balancing act. “This will be delicate to navigate, given that the current inflation trajectory is not something that the CBN and government would want to be derailed.”

The Hot Money Tightrope

Meanwhile, the naira has taken its own hit. The official rate slid from around NGN 1.36 K to NGN 1.425 K as foreign investors got jittery and pulled money out.

But Oyetayo pushes back on the idea that this signals something broken in Nigeria’s system.

“Nigeria is one of the most compelling frontier investment opportunities for emerging market-focused hedge funds at the moment, due to the ongoing strong economic recovery and strong current account surplus,” he says.

He points out that Nigeria is still attracting serious interest. Foreign inflows surged 151% to $1.6 billion in January, with most parked in fixed-income securities.

That flood of hot money had strengthened the naira and boosted external reserves to USD 50.45 B, their highest in 13 years. The Central Bank of Nigeria even had room to step back, contributing just USD 34 M to FX supply in January, down from USD 654 M in December.

But the Gulf crisis exposed the flip side. As Oyetayo puts it, Nigeria remains “exposed to hot-money flows, though, the recent outflows, he argues, were about global panic, not Nigeria specifically.

“Yes, this means Nigeria is exposed to hot-money flows, but it was one of several frontier corridors that saw outflows in the rush for hedges and safe-haven investments,” Oyetayo explains. “This is not symptomatic of any fragility in Nigeria’s FX framework.”

The Central Bank injected USD 200 M to calm things down, according to reports. And Oyetayo notes the CBN actually has room to do this now. “The CBN’s foreign reserves are as strong as ever thanks to prudent dollar purchases when NAFEM dropped well below NGN 1.4 K earlier in 2026, so there are no immediate fears of funds dwindling should the CBN look to inject more supply.”

What to Watch in the Coming Weeks

Oyetayo also flags something that may have been drowned out by the unfolding global upheavals: the March 31 bank recapitalisation deadline.

“With the global noise, attention has certainly turned away from the upcoming bank recapitalisation deadline at the end of March,” he says. “This is going to be a critical date in the diary as we may see a rush for local currency reserves from domestic banks.”

He explains the dynamic, stating that the recent rush for dollars may have actually helped local banks hold onto hard currency. But if sentiment reverses and foreign investors start buying naira assets again while banks are scrambling to meet capital requirements, “we may see some banks struggling to meet these cap requirements.”

Oyetayo doesn’t predict disaster. “This is unlikely to instill any shock in banking infrastructure, but it may incite some volatility in the coming weeks.”

For ordinary Nigerians, however, it’s a tough situation. Fuel drives transport, transport drives food prices, and both now point upward.

Oyetayo argues that a resolution in the Gulf would quickly restore foreign investor appetite and put the naira back on its appreciation track. But he’s realistic about what happens in the meantime.

“The relief on inflation concerns, combined with renewed appetite from foreign investors, will help re-establish the naira’s recent appreciation trend,” he says. But that’s a big “if” while the Gulf remains tense.

The paradox of Nigeria’s oil wealth remains evident in that when oil prices rise, the country’s accounts may look healthier on paper, but its citizens feel poorer in their wallets. And in this crisis, the distance between those two realities keeps growing.

David Chima spent months watching conversations go nowhere. A seller in Lagos would message a buyer in New York. The buyer would ask a few questions. The seller would respond. Then nothing. Another week, another email chain, another fade to black.

This happened over and over. Chima and his co-founder, Isaac Edmund, had built Bondly, an escrow startup, on the simple idea that cross-border trade in Africa struggles because people don’t trust the payment part. Fix that, and more deals happen.

The data told them they had it backwards.

“We noticed that most deals weren’t failing at the payment stage, they were collapsing much earlier,” Edmund says now. “Many negotiations never even got far enough for escrow to matter.”

The problem, they realised, wasn’t trust in the payment mechanism but in the person on the other end of the email. Sellers couldn’t prove they were real. Buyers couldn’t tell if a business had actually shipped anything before. So conversations just died.

That realisation killed Bondly. And it birthed Kuraway, a company that looks nothing like what they started with.

***

Kuraway, they tell WT, is what happens when they stopped asking “how do we fix payments?” and start asking “how do we help merchants prove they’re credible?”

The name comes from the Japanese word for storehouse. The business is a digital storefront where African merchants can show international buyers that they actually exist, that they’ve actually done business before, that they can actually deliver. Payments still happen—Kuraway processes them—but they’re now the last thing, not the first.

Since September 2023, the company has processed just over USD 600 K in transactions across Nigeria, Ghana and Cameroon. About 1,300 businesses have used it. The take rate hovers around 5%.

Ten percent of the volume comes from repeat customers. A lot of that is diaspora buyers in the UK, US, Canada and Australia, ordering from African stores back home.

But the more interesting customers are the ones that one wouldn’t expect. A Lagos golf club buying coffee beans. Fidson Healthcare offtaking dextrose and cornstarch. Local industries signing monthly contracts for raw materials.

These aren’t the corner shops that burned through investor cash at other B2B platforms. Chima says Kuraway deliberately chases niches others ignore: chemicals, cosmetics, minerals, agro-commodities. Businesses that need to move goods regularly, not just once.

***

The B2B e-commerce sector in Africa has spent the last couple years in various stages of crisis. Companies that raised millions on promises of digitising informal retail have retrenched, restructured or simply folded. The postmortems tend to focus on familiar culprits such as asset-heavy models, thin margins, and unpredictable demand.

Chima doesn’t entirely buy that framing.

Capital intensity wasn’t really the problem, he argues. The deeper issue was assumptions about how informal retail actually works. A woman selling provisions from a kiosk doesn’t order the way a supermarket does. As he explains, she buys based on daily cash flow. She has relationships with multiple distributors. She expects flexibility. Building a platform that assumes steady, predictable demand from these merchants was always going to be a gamble.

“The true constraint is economic and behavioural,” Chima says. “Thin margins, fragile trust, the need for credit, and incorrect assumptions about informal retail.”

This is why Kuraway isn’t trying to be everything to everyone. It doesn’t own trucks. It doesn’t warehouse inventory. It sits in the middle, connecting buyers and sellers, verifying both sides, handling the money when a deal actually closes.

Edmund describes the model as “owning the transaction layer.” Control discovery, verification, negotiation and payment, and, that way, they get to capture recurring activity rather than one-off fees. Fintech becomes a feature of the transaction, not the product itself.

Chima points to Alibaba as the template. Its marketplaces provide discoverability, but most profit comes from payment and cloud services. Marketplace transactions are often thin-margin substitution revenues.

“Discoverability draws users in, but long-term value comes from services that increase profitability; payments, operational support, and recurring transaction flows,” he says.

***

Chima also notes that across Nigeria, Ghana and Cameroon, merchant behaviour looks more similar than different. Trust is the common denominator everywhere. If trust drops, engagement drops, regardless of how digitally savvy a market is.

But Nigeria stands out for how quickly it adopted the model. Chima points to a younger population, better network connectivity and a social commerce culture that already had merchants comfortable with digital transactions. Instagram is a real marketplace here in a way it isn’t elsewhere.

The company launched its current model last year, after the pivot late 2024. Margins are improving. Volume is climbing. The real test will be whether Kuraway can scale without the capital intensity that sunk competitors.

Edmund thinks investor confidence will return when startups start showing their work. “Investors need clear sights into margins, pricing structures, and the assumptions behind reported numbers,” he says. “Often, startups present figures without explaining how they arrived at them.”

Chima, who learned trade watching his mother distribute rice in Owerri markets, now plays chess in his spare time. It requires thinking several moves ahead, anticipating what the other side will do before they do it.

In five years, he thinks B2B e-commerce in Africa will look like infrastructure; platforms that help merchants get discovered and get paid, with logistics handled by specialists who move goods across borders that still take a week or more to clear.

“The true margins will go to those controlling the infrastructure and middle of the transaction,” he says. “Connecting buyers and sellers efficiently, rather than just offering access.”

LemFi, the global financial platform built for the underserved, has officially been registered as a Payment Service Provider (PSP) by the Bank of Canada under the country’s new Retail Payment Activities Act (RPAA). 

LemFi already serves customers in Canada, and this new registration brings the company fully into the country’s enhanced federal supervisory framework, strengthening oversight under the Bank of Canada’s new payments regime.

The milestone is a key moment in LemFi’s ongoing quest to reinforce trust through compliance, but also serves the company’s mission to build the full stack of financial services that move with people across borders. While many providers focus solely on remittances, LemFi is building a full financial ecosystem spanning payments, credit, savings and more within one platform.

Fastest-growing outbound market 

Canada represents one of the world’s fastest-growing outbound remittance markets. According to the Migration Policy Institute, outbound remittances from Canada reached an estimated USD 8.6 B in 2023, up from USD 7.5 B in 2020. India, China and the Philippines are the largest recipient countries – key corridors already supported by LemFi’s global infrastructure.

Under Canada’s RPAA framework, payment providers must meet strict standards for operational resilience, safeguarding and risk management. Through its Canadian entity, Pomelo Technology Canada Ltd, LemFi demonstrated its ability to meet these enhanced federal requirements. The legislation establishes a higher regulatory standard for payment providers, increasing accountability and strengthening protections for consumers.

The registration adds to LemFi’s expanding global regulatory footprint, which includes licenses and approvals in the UK, Ireland, Australia and across multiple US states. Today, LemFi serves more than 2 million customers globally, enabling transfers to over 30 countries across Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America. Over the past year, the company has expanded beyond remittances into credit and savings, launching Send Now Pay Later (SNPL) in the UK, introducing Instant Access Savings Accounts and expanding its credit infrastructure following the acquisition of UK fintech Pillar. Backed by a USD 53M Series B round and delivering 65% year-on-year revenue growth, LemFi continues to scale as a regulated, AI-enabled financial platform built for global citizens. 

Rian Cochran, co-founder and CFO of LemFi, said: “Canada is one of the world’s most important remittance markets, driven by a diverse and growing immigrant population. Being registered as a Payment Service Provider under the RPAA reflects our commitment to building a platform that is not only innovative but deeply aligned with the highest regulatory and operational standards.

“For our customers, this is about trust. It means they can move money across borders knowing their funds are handled securely within a robust supervisory framework, while still benefiting from the speed, affordability and simplicity that define the LemFi experience.”

The fraudster who cleaned out one Nigerian fintech last week is probably applying for an account at another one today. And unless someone says something, he’ll probably get it.

This is the paradox Lanre Ogungbe has been staring at for years. As CEO of Prembly (formerly Identitypass), a compliance and identity verification company serving 800 businesses monthly, he’s watched the same patterns repeat. A fraudster hits Platform A, gets flagged, vanishes, then reappears on Platform B using the exact same phone number, the exact same ID, the exact same playbook.

“They use the same tactics on another platform because you were quiet about it,” Ogungbe tells WT. “We’ve seen this multiple times play out, enabled by your silence.”

This week, Prembly is launching FraudLens, billed as Africa’s first effective open-source fraud intelligence bank.

The idea, to get financial institutions to actually share data about who’s ripping them off, though simple in theory yet complicated in practice, is starting to find traction.

How it actually works

Prembly’s FraudLens has two faces. The public side is a real-time dashboard showing fraud trends, patterns and prevalence; fraud awareness made accessible, so to speak.

Anyone can see that this week, 451 fraud events were reported, that Niger state is showing unusual activity, that Lagos leads in attempted compromises.

The private side is where the actual work happens. Verified, regulated businesses that subscribe to Prembly’s platform get access to a shared database.

When they onboard a new customer, the system flags if that phone number, that ID, that device fingerprint has been reported by other institutions. The business doesn’t have to act on the information—it can still approve the customer—but at least it knows what it’s walking into.

Crucially, reporting isn’t free-for-all. Every submission requires vetted evidence. Internal approval. A paper trail.

“We can’t just have somebody submit something false,” Ogungbe explains. “If you wrongly claim a consumer committed fraud, there’s a liability process. There’s a retrieval process if we made a mistake.”

Will rivals actually share?

On the surface, we like to imagine fraud as Hollywood hacking; hooded figures breaking through firewalls in dark rooms. But sit with Ogungbe, and he’ll tell you the truth is both simpler and more disturbing in that the system is designed to stay quiet.

“We don’t do a lot of documentation of the events that happen,” Ogungbe says. “When fraud happens, we are meant to document it so that we can prevent it. But the issue is that when you document, it comes with panic.”

This is the knot at the centre of Nigeria’s fraud problem. Document a major fraud event, and consumers will withdraw their money. Banks collapse. It’s played out in the past, the generations that watched banks go under in the 1990s carry that trauma. So institutions stay silent. Fraudsters get documented nowhere. And the same person who cleaned out one fintech walks into the next one and does it again.

“Fraud really works when data is hidden,” Ogungbe explains. “We’ve seen the same ID reported as fraud by a particular fintech, and the same person used the same ID to go to another platform and commit the same type of fraud. That could have been prevented if the other person had said something had happened.”

The obvious question—and Ogungbe has heard it enough to pre-empt it—is why competitors would cooperate. Banks spend millions fighting each other for customers. Why hand over intelligence that might expose their own weaknesses?

Ogungbe’s answer is that they already do. Just not publicly.

The Bank Verification Number system is owned by the banks. Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System is private, owned by the banks. Compliance officers from every major financial institution meet monthly and share information, Ogungbe points out. As it turns out, the competition that plays out in marketing campaigns doesn’t extend to the back rooms where fraud is discussed.

“From a public market perspective, it has to appear as though there’s a war between everybody,” the Prembly CEO says. “But what really happens at the back end is different.”

Credit bureaus already share default data by law. Fraud data, he argues, is the logical next layer, and the infrastructure simply didn’t exist before.

Traditional systems from NIBSS, the Central Bank and the police force weren’t built by KYC companies. He maintains that they lacked the verification technology, the biometric integration, the big-data analysis that the Y Combinator-backed startup has spent years building.

The fraud that lives in the infrastructure

When Ogungbe runs through how money actually gets stolen in Nigeria, the Hollywood hacking narrative barely registers. The real damage is systemic, he asserts; fraud is built into the systems themselves.

He discovered he personally had over 15 bank accounts opened in his name that he knew nothing about. Created during his NYSC days, when banks flooded camps with sign-up drives. Created by branch managers chasing targets, created using his information without his knowledge.

“You trace it down, it comes from a manager somewhere that insists that for the branch to stay open, you have to open 50,000 new accounts in a community of less than 100,000 people,” he says. “How do they do that? They use the same information to open multiple accounts.”

This is what Prembly’s system is designed to catch. Not the lone hacker in a dark room, but the organised operation running the same synthetic ID across five platforms in the same week.

The weaponisation concerns

Any database of alleged fraudsters raises uncomfortable questions. Who decides someone is a fraudster? What happens when a business gets it wrong? Could this become a de facto blacklist with no appeal process?

Ogungbe acknowledges the risks. The system is currently restricted to businesses with proper compliance structures, specifically to prevent weaponisation. Individuals can’t report other individuals; that loophole stays closed until safeguards are stronger.

“Can it be weaponised? Yes. Have we been able to close the loop from an individual perspective? No. That’s why we’re not releasing that to the public,” he says.

For now, only the statistics are public. The private details stay with verified institutions, and every flagged entry comes with evidence. If a business reports someone for chargeback fraud, it needs to show the transaction. If it’s identity fraud, it needs to show the ID mismatch.

The cat-and-mouse reality

Ogungbe doesn’t pretend this ends fraud. Fraudsters will adapt. They’ll find new loopholes, new infrastructures to exploit, new ways to weaponise AI and social engineering. The game is cat-and-mouse, and the mice are motivated.

“What that does is it makes them ask more questions,” he says. “It makes them have heightened security. If somebody can go through the stress and beat everything you’ve put in place, then the amount they’re going after is worth it. For those cases, you pursue them.”

The goal, he says, isn’t perfection but making fraud harder. It’s ensuring that the person who hit one platform can’t simply walk into the next one unchallenged. It’s introducing consequence into a system designed for speed above all else.

“If we can reduce fraud losses by half or more in five years, that’s a winning streak for us,” Ogungbe says.

The trust question

Ask Ogungbe what success actually looks like, and he doesn’t point to dashboards or press releases. He speaks of the Opay rider who accepts a transfer without waiting to confirm. The POS operator who trusts that the money actually moved. The consumer who stops checking their banking app with dread.

“That is what we’re tracking,” he says. “Create more trust within the consumer space.”

For now, trust is still in short supply. The EFCC recently dropped numbers that should give everyone pause: NGN 18.7 B stolen, more than 900,000 victims, one customer operating 960 accounts in a single bank, and NGN 162 B (~USD 114 M) in suspicious cryptocurrency transactions with no oversight.

A system built for speed discovering, belatedly, that silence has a cost. And it would soon become clearer whether shared intelligence arrives in time to matter, or whether the fraudsters have already moved on to the next loophole.

For a long time, access shaped the structure of investing in Africa.

Access to brokers. Access to financial infrastructure. Access to trustworthy settlement systems. Access to foreign markets. Access to the kind of tools that institutional desks treated as standard, while retail investors had to work around delays, friction, and weak platform design.

That gap is narrowing fast.

Africa’s fintech ecosystem has moved beyond the early phase of digital convenience. It now plays a central role in how people discover, evaluate, and execute investment opportunities. The real shift is not simply that more investors can open accounts from a phone. The deeper shift is that participation has become more structured, more transparent, and more aligned with global market standards.

That matters because serious market participation depends on confidence. Investors need to know what they are trading through, how orders are handled, how funds move, and what protections exist when markets turn volatile. In many African markets, fintech firms and digital brokers are now building exactly that layer of trust. They are doing it with better infrastructure, cleaner product design, and stronger compliance discipline.

This is why Africa has become one of the most closely watched regions in modern finance. The opportunity is not based on hype. It is based on the fact that financial access is improving in ways that directly affect trading behaviour, capital flow, and investor expectations.

The quality of the platform now shapes the quality of the investor experience

Every mature trading market eventually learns the same lesson. Better access means very little if the tools themselves are weak.

That is why platform quality has become such a central issue, both in Africa and worldwide. Investors who trade actively, manage risk carefully, or allocate across multiple asset classes need stable execution, clear pricing, and interfaces that support decision-making instead of slowing it down. This is where reliable trading platforms become key for the evolution of fintech. 

The African fintech wave has increased access, but access alone does not create durable trust. A market grows when users feel that platform standards are improving, along with participation. That includes faster onboarding, stronger verification systems, better charting environments, and more visible fee structures. It also includes the less visible elements that experienced traders care about most, such as execution quality, account security, and operational resilience during market stress.

This global standard now matters more in Africa because many investors enter the market through mobile-first channels. The first platform experience often becomes the investor’s reference point for what digital finance should feel like. If that experience is confusing or unreliable, confidence fades early. If it is efficient and transparent, users stay engaged and become more sophisticated over time.

That has created a healthy form of pressure across the sector. Fintech firms and brokers now have to compete on usability and trust, rather than on basic availability alone. That is a meaningful evolution. It lifts expectations and gradually improves the entire market environment.

Mobile-first finance changed who gets to participate

The mobile story in Africa has been discussed for years, but its effect on digital trading deserves a more serious reading.

Mobile-first design did more than increase convenience. It changed the profile of the market participant. When investing tools become accessible through a familiar device, the financial system starts reaching users who were previously excluded by geography, branch dependency, or desktop-based product assumptions. That shift has brought a new layer of investors into the market, including professionals, small business owners, and digitally fluent younger users who expect financial tools to work with the same speed as the rest of their digital lives.

This is one reason African fintech has developed with a different instinct from some older financial systems. It did not begin by asking how to digitise an old brokerage model. In many cases, it asked how to build financial access for users whose first serious interaction with modern finance would happen through a smartphone.

That design logic has consequences. Mobile platforms in the region often place more attention on onboarding flow, wallet integration, and real-time usability. They are built for environments where attention is fragmented, and network conditions can vary. That has encouraged leaner interfaces and more practical user journeys.

For active traders and experienced investors, that may sound basic. It is not. Good mobile design affects execution behaviour. It reduces avoidable mistakes. It shortens the distance between analysis and action. It also makes it easier for users to monitor positions and react to market conditions without being tied to a desk.

In practical terms, mobile-first trading has turned participation into a habit rather than an event. That distinction matters. Markets deepen when engagement becomes continuous and informed.

Infrastructure is finally doing more of the heavy lifting

Underneath every strong trading environment sits a layer most users rarely think about until it fails.

Payments. Connectivity. Data delivery. Identity verification. Settlement processes. Regulatory reporting.

In earlier phases of digital finance, these layers often created the exact friction that kept retail participation shallow. Funding an account could take too long. Identity checks could feel inconsistent. Market data could arrive poorly packaged or with limited transparency. For many users, the problem was not interest in investing. The problem was that the system made participation harder than it needed to be.

Africa’s fintech evolution is changing that from the ground up.

Improved payment rails have made deposits and withdrawals more practical. Better digital identity processes have made onboarding more reliable. Cloud-based architecture and platform optimisation have allowed more firms to offer stronger uptime and smoother user experiences across devices. The result is not only speed. It is a more credible market structure.

This is especially important in trading, where confidence can disappear quickly when the operational layer feels weak. Investors can tolerate market risk because market risk is part of the game. What they resist is process risk. They do not want uncertainty around whether an order went through, whether funds will settle properly, or whether the platform can hold up when volumes rise.

As infrastructure improves, that operational anxiety begins to fade. It does not disappear completely, because no market is frictionless. Still, the reduction in avoidable friction changes investor behaviour in a meaningful way. It encourages repeat participation and supports longer-term account growth. It also makes the market look more investable to outside observers who watch platform maturity as a signal of regional financial readiness.

Smarter regulation is raising the floor for everyone

Regulation has often been framed as a barrier to innovation. In reality, poor regulation is usually the greater barrier.

Digital trading platforms scale well when users understand the rules, the obligations, and the protections built into the system. That is why smarter regulatory development across parts of Africa has become one of the most important drivers of confidence in the fintech sector. The strongest frameworks do not slow innovation for the sake of caution. They create enough structure for serious innovation to last.

This is where the conversation becomes more interesting for experienced readers. The issue is no longer whether regulation should exist. The real issue is what kind of regulation best supports platform growth without weakening investor protection. Africa’s Fintech sector is evolving, and markets need standards that address onboarding integrity, custody safeguards, dispute handling, disclosure quality, and capital controls, while still allowing digital firms to iterate and expand.

Some African jurisdictions have started moving in that direction with a more practical mindset. Instead of forcing fintech firms into outdated models, regulators are increasingly engaging with the realities of digital finance. That kind of engagement matters because it encourages product development that is both ambitious and accountable.

A stronger regulatory floor also improves competitive quality. It becomes harder for weak operators to win attention through aggressive promises or opaque structures. That gives better firms more room to differentiate on service quality, technology, and trust.

For the investor, this has a simple effect. The environment becomes easier to read. That clarity supports better decisions, and better decisions support deeper market participation.