Maya Famodu: Fragmentation is Africa’s Biggest Fintech Challenge, Not Payments

• Says continent must shift from building payment apps to connecting financial systems, others

• Declares $1.1tn mobile money market proved Africa’s digital payments prowess

Founder of Ingressive Capital, Maya Horgan Famodu, says Africa’s fintech industry has largely solved the challenge of digital payments, and its next growth phase will depend on eliminating fragmentation across the continent’s financial systems rather than launching more payment applications.

Famodu said Africa’s biggest obstacle was no longer moving money digitally but coordinating the continent’s numerous payment infrastructures into a single, interoperable financial ecosystem capable of supporting seamless cross-border commerce.

She made the remarks while outlining what she described as the next frontier for African fintech.

Famodu stated that the continent had already established itself as the world’s dominant mobile money market.

According to her, mobile money platforms across Africa processed $1.105 trillion in transactions in 2024, representing an annual growth of 15 per cent.

Citing GSMA data, she pointed out that the transactions, carried out through 81.8 billion transfers and 1.1 billion registered accounts, accounted for about 74 per cent of all mobile money transactions globally.

She also said those figures had effectively ended the long-held narrative that Africa was merely catching up with developed markets in digital finance.

Famodu stated, “For years, we’ve described Africa’s payments story as ‘catching up’ to the West. We should retire that narrative. You don’t process nearly three-quarters of the world’s mobile money transactions by accident.”

She maintained that the real question confronting policymakers, investors and innovators was no longer whether Africa possessed digital payment capabilities, but whether the continent had succeeded in creating a unified digital economy.

She observed that while countries, including Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa, had each built robust payment rails, the inability of those systems to communicate effectively remained a major constraint to regional trade and financial integration.

Famodu said, “The real constraint today isn’t that Africa can’t move money. It can. The real constraint is that too many systems still don’t speak the same language.

“Nigeria has rails. Kenya has rails. Ghana has rails. South Africa has rails. The harder challenge is making all of those systems behave like one economic network. That’s a coordination problem, not a payments problem.”

Famodu said the next generation of African fintech firms would derive greater value from building the underlying infrastructure connecting financial institutions than from developing customer-facing applications.

She identified identity verification, connectivity, settlement infrastructure, compliance, and distribution systems as the foundational layers that would underpin future growth across the continent’s digital economy.

According to her, while payment applications often attract public attention and investment, the less visible infrastructure powering those services ultimately creates stronger and more sustainable competitive advantages.

She explained that infrastructure businesses scaled differently because their growth depended on increasing adoption across the financial ecosystem rather than acquiring individual customers.

Famodu said, “If 10 fintech companies rely on your identity layer, settlement engine or compliance infrastructure, your growth is tied to the entire ecosystem expanding around you.”

The venture capital investor also challenged conventional investment thinking, contending that investors should focus less on how large an individual fintech product could become and more on whether other products would become impossible without the infrastructure supporting them.

Famodu stated that financial inclusion, although still important, was no longer sufficient to describe Africa’s fintech opportunity.

She pointed out that investor confidence in the sector remained strong, with fintech attracting 47 per cent of all African start-up funding in 2024.

However, she observed that 84 per cent of start-up investment remained concentrated in just four markets—Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt, and South Africa.

According to her, the continent has largely proven the case for digitising finance, but the more pressing investment gap now lies in building interoperability, settlement, digital identity and regulatory compliance systems capable of connecting multiple financial platforms into a seamless continental network.

Looking beyond fintech, Famodu suggested Africa’s experience navigating fragmented currencies, regulators, payment rails, and markets could eventually become a competitive advantage globally.

She stressed that solutions developed to overcome Africa’s complexity could provide a blueprint for interoperable financial systems elsewhere in the world.

According to her, the biggest winners may ultimately be the firms operating behind the scenes to make hundreds of financial technology platforms work together more efficiently.

She said, “The last decade belonged to companies that digitised payments. The next may belong to companies that coordinate them.”