The problem wasn\u2019t that Africa lacked payment systems, but that those systems didn\u2019t work seamlessly together. Businesses expanding across borders had to navigate different banks, payment methods, and settlement arrangements, making it harder to collect payments and move money between markets.\u00a0<\/p>\n
For a merchant in Johannesburg selling to a customer in Nigeria, cross-border payments meant relying on a SWIFT transfer and waiting for confirmation before releasing the goods. SWIFT messages could take up to 48 hours<\/a> as they passed through correspondent banks, frustrating instant trade. Agboola wanted to make those transactions faster and easier.<\/p>\n \u201cThose were the driving forces behind Flutterwave: How do we become like a butterfly that can create a ripple effect in the ecosystem and still be tiny, yet we can make waves? Hence the name Flutterwave, \u201d he told McKinsey in 2022<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Iyin Aboyeji, a co-founder of Andela, a global tech talent network, faced the same problem while trying to support African developers<\/a> and their businesses and had the same conclusion: without payments infrastructure, promising businesses would struggle to grow their revenue.<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of our talents were desirous of building products, but when I would look at the ideas they came up with, it was very clear to me that if we didn\u2019t have payments, many of those products could not scale revenue as fast,\u201d Aboyeji, Flutterwave\u2019s first chief executive officer, told TechCabal in an interview.<\/p>\n Their ambition became Flutterwave, a payments technology company Agboola founded while at Access Bank, a tier-one Nigerian bank, with Aboyeji and Adeleke Adekoya, then Access Bank\u2019s head of digital banking. The idea was to connect merchants to banks, card networks such as Visa and Mastercard, and other payment providers through a single Application Programming Interface (API)\u2014a tool that lets different apps and computer systems talk to each other\u2014allowing businesses to collect and disburse money without building separate integrations for every market.<\/p>\n A decade later, Flutterwave says it has processed over $50 billion<\/a> in transactions, serves more than two million businesses<\/a>, and has expanded beyond payment processing into remittances, consumer payments, and banking. Aboyeji has left the company, and Flutterwave is now pursuing a wider financial-infrastructure strategy while working towards profitability and a potential public listing.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/c76c7bbc41.mjedge.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/tc\/2026\/11\/image-88-1024x537.webp\")