After about ten years as a payments company, Flutterwave is building its next phase around banking, CEO Olugbenga “GB” Agboola said on Wednesday at the Moonshot technology conference.
“Our claim to fame is obviously payments,” he said, but if customers trust you with their payments, it is easier to hold their money for them. The plan is direct deposits, savings and commercial lending. Lending starts with working capital loans to existing merchants, then moves to real-economy sectors like manufacturing, and later to SMEs, one sector at a time to manage default risk.
Flutterwave got a Nigerian banking licence in April, which lets it hold customer deposits directly instead of relying only on partner banks. It also bought open-banking startup Mono in an all-stock deal. Ghana and Kenya are the next markets for the banking push.
The company is valued at $3 billion and says it has processed over $40 billion across more than a billion transactions.
Sources: BusinessDay
