By Olugbenga “GB” Agboola
Founder and CEO, Flutterwave
Africa is entering its second great fintech era. The first was about possibility. It proved that digital payments, APIs, and cross-border money movement could work on this continent. That era was powered by hundreds of founders building specialised pieces of a much larger puzzle. This new era is about durability. Financial infrastructure now has to stay up. It has to survive market cycles. It has to be strong enough that millions of businesses can depend on it every day. This shift guided Flutterwave’s decision to bring Mono into our ecosystem. It was done to protect the rails.
The hard truth about infrastructure in Africa
For years, while fragmentation drove innovation in African fintech, creating numerous specialized tools, the demanding cost of essential infrastructure became clear. Infrastructure requires constant capital, deep engineering, and regulatory engagement, operating on thin margins while demanding high reliability. Mono successfully built one of the continent’s most unique and relied-upon open banking backbones.
However, as its market grew, it became evident that this essential and widely-relied-upon infrastructure required the operational resilience and balance sheet strength of a global platform like Flutterwave. Our decision to bring in this critical piece of infrastructure ensures the long-term stability and scale needed for the next era of African fintech, benefiting the entire ecosystem, including our competitors.
Why Mono
Mono brings deep open banking connectivity across Nigeria and one of the strongest financial data layers in the market into the Flutterwave ecosystem. This significantly strengthens our ability to build smarter, more reliable financial products for African businesses.
At the payments layer, Mono enables secure connections to bank accounts across Nigeria, supporting use cases such as recurring and account-based payments where permitted. At the data layer, it provides access to consent-based financial data that helps improve onboarding, risk assessment, and product design. At the identity layer, Mono supports verification across multiple official data sources, strengthening compliance and trust on the platform.
There’s more. Imagine the possibilities when regulated banking services are added to this mix. Imagine the ability to issue accounts, hold balances, and embed these services directly into Flutterwave for Business and Send App as a result of this acquisition. This could be a way to elevate the infrastructure that Nigerians have come to love and depend on. Truly, the possibilities are endless.
Beyond infrastructure, Mono expands distribution. It allows us to embed financial services natively into our products while opening new channels such as WhatsApp-based commerce that reduce friction in how businesses reach customers and how quickly value flows through the platform.
Mono is already trusted by a range of leading financial institutions and fintechs in the ecosystem, reflecting the robustness of its infrastructure and compliance standards.
This is how we move from relying on third-party infrastructure to taking greater responsibility for the stability, reliability, and scale of the financial systems African businesses depend on.
What owning infrastructure really means
Amazon Web Services hosts Netflix even though Amazon competes in streaming. That works because data firewalls, governance, and trust protect every customer on the platform. Google invests billions in subsea internet cables that power the entire digital economy, including companies that compete with Google. A faster, more reliable internet benefits everyone.
That is how Mono is being operated.
Mono continues to serve every fintech, lender, bank, and startup in the ecosystem, including companies that compete with Flutterwave. That neutrality is what makes the network valuable. Our role is to ensure that Mono has regulatory stability, capital depth, and operational resilience so it can deliver the uptime and reliability that the market now requires.
Why consolidation strengthens financial rails
When dozens of companies all build the same bank connections, nobody has enough volume to negotiate better terms. Failure rates remain high. Prices stay elevated. Mature markets solve this through consolidation of their rails.
In South Africa, Stitch acquired Efficacy Payments to become a Designated Clearing System Participant. That move improved reliability and reduced dependency on intermediaries. In Europe, Visa acquired Tink. Tink continues to serve competitors across the financial system because its value comes from network trust and scale. These examples show how infrastructure evolves when markets mature.
Africa is reaching that stage.
What we are building toward
Flutterwave competes on a global stage. We are measured against the largest payment platforms in the world. Competing at that level requires infrastructure that is resilient, trusted, and built to last. Mono is part of that foundation and our work on Stablecoins is another leg of that foundation. Our acquisition of Mono strengthens Africa’s open banking backbone so that every fintech, lender, and business that relies on it can keep building with confidence. We backed the rails so the entire ecosystem can move forward on stable ground.