Africa Isn’t Catching Up to the West in Fintech. It Left a While Ago
A colleague said something to me last year that I haven’t quite been able to shake. We were in a conversation about emerging markets, and he said, very genuinely, “It’s brilliant what’s happening in Africa with fintech. They’re really starting to catch up.”
He meant it kindly. I didn’t correct him in the moment. But I’ve been thinking about it ever since, because the framing is so wrong it’s almost the opposite of what’s true.
Africa isn’t catching up. In several areas that actually matter, it moved past the West years ago, and it did so precisely because it had no choice but to build something new. There was no old system to protect. No entrenched lobby keeping the rails running for one more earnings cycle. Just a problem that needed solving and a generation of engineers and entrepreneurs who had to figure it out from scratch.
I’ve spent over eight years building fintech products on both sides of this story: cross-border remittance platforms, payment systems, and infrastructure that real people in Lagos and London depend on daily. What I’ve seen from both ends has shifted how I think about what innovation actually means and where it’s actually happening.
The problem with having a lot to lose
There’s a version of this conversation where I talk about M-Pesa, you nod along, and we both agree that mobile money in Africa is impressive. That’s not what I want to do here, partly because you’ve probably read that article already, and partly because the more interesting point is about what makes legacy infrastructure so hard to escape.
The US still runs significant payment volume on ACH rails designed in the 1970s. The UK’s Faster Payments system, genuinely impressive when it launched in 2008, is still fundamentally built around sort codes and account numbers. These are concepts that predate the internet. Changing them requires negotiating with hundreds of institutions, regulators, processors and industry bodies who have all built their businesses around the existing plumbing. Nobody wants to be the one who breaks the system, so the system doesn’t get replaced. It gets patched.
When mobile money was emerging in Kenya in the late 2000s, none of that existed. There were no legacy card networks to appease, no mainframe banking systems to migrate, no installed base of ATMs making the case for keeping old infrastructure alive. M-Pesa didn’t have to win a debate about whether to replace the existing system. There was no existing system. It just built what worked and became the default.
That’s the actual shape of leapfrogging. It’s not that Africa got clever. It’s that Africa got lucky in a very particular way: it was free to start fresh.
And by 2025, the effects of that freedom had compounded well beyond mobile money. Ghana’s GhIPSS Mobile Money Interoperability platform, which launched in 2018, lets users move money across different mobile networks and bank accounts through a single interface. In December 2025, Ghanaian mobile money platforms processed GH₵518 billion in transactions in a single month, with, according to Bank of Ghana data reported by GhIPSS, digital payments now accounting for 82% of all financial transactions in the country. To be clear about the scale of that: mobile money processed nearly three times more value that year than all traditional and bank-based payment channels combined.
That’s not a developing market catching up. That’s infrastructure running laps.
What building at SendSprint taught me
When I was working on payment features at SendSprint, something kept bothering me that I couldn’t quite articulate at first. We were building a cross-border remittance platform, moving money between African corridors and international destinations. And what I kept noticing was that transactions between two African countries on modern infrastructure settled faster than a standard bank transfer between two European accounts.
Once you understand the plumbing, it makes complete sense. African mobile money didn’t bolt itself onto the old paradigm. It built around phone numbers, SIM cards, and agent networks. No IBAN lookups, no SWIFT routing chains, no correspondent banking fees stacking up at every hop. The money just moved.
Meanwhile, Nigeria in March 2023 became the first African country to publish formal operational guidelines for open banking, with the Central Bank of Nigeria releasing a framework covering payments, remittances, credit and personal finance. Nigeria’s financial ecosystem was already mature enough to run on open infrastructure. The regulatory clarity was the final piece.
The EU’s PSD3 was still sitting in Parliament committee debate well into 2024. Nigeria had already shipped.
I’m not saying this to be contrarian. I’m saying it because I watched it happen from close enough to feel the difference.
What happens when you build for someone with nothing
There’s a pattern to how fintech innovation works in the West that’s worth naming. You target the early adopter first. Educated, financially stable, probably already has a current account, a savings account, and a stocks and shares ISA. You build something slick for that person, get your Series A, build credibility, and then eventually try to work your way down to less affluent users.
The problem is that by the time you get there, the product has been designed around assumptions that don’t hold. You need a permanent address for onboarding. You need a UK mobile number for two-factor authentication. You need a credit history for anything involving credit. Peel those assumptions back and the product just stops working for a huge swath of people it was theoretically meant to serve.
African fintech started at the other end. The biggest innovations came from building for people who had none of those things: no fixed address, no bank account, no credit history, no reliable internet connection. And when those are your constraints from day one, you end up making different decisions at every level of the stack.
I noticed this shift in myself while building payment flows for users on 3G connections in Lagos. Network dropouts there aren’t an edge case you handle with a polite error message. They’re a routine part of the user’s day. A failed transaction isn’t a minor inconvenience; for someone sending money to cover school fees or a medical bill, it genuinely matters. Building for that reality forces you to think properly about retry logic, offline states, idempotency, and what it actually means for a transaction to be “done.”
Honestly? It made me a considerably better engineer than I was before. Not because the algorithms were harder, but because the stakes were real enough to demand rigour.
Constraints, when they’re genuine, produce better software. I’ve seen this too many times to dismiss it as coincidence.
Where things genuinely aren’t sorted
I’d be doing myself and the reader a disservice if I glossed over the real problems, so I won’t.
Regulatory fragmentation across 54 countries is still a genuine obstacle. What satisfies KYC requirements in Nigeria doesn’t automatically clear in Kenya or Ghana. Cross-border infrastructure between African nations has improved considerably, but there are still corridors where it’s genuinely faster to send money from Lagos to London than from Lagos to Accra. That’s an awkward truth about how international financial plumbing was built, and it hasn’t fully been unwound yet.
Funding remains heavily concentrated. Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa and Egypt collectively absorb the vast majority of African fintech venture capital. There are markets with real unsolved problems and talented engineers ready to build solutions that barely register on most investors’ radars.
And while the World Bank’s 2025 Global Findex report showed account ownership in Sub-Saharan Africa growing to 58% of adults, up from 49% in 2021, having a mobile wallet is a starting point rather than a destination. Meaningful access to credit, insurance, savings products that actually build wealth: those are harder problems, and they’re still very much works in progress.
These aren’t footnotes. They’re the real work that remains.
What I think the West is missing
The lesson here isn’t “build a mobile money product.” That ship has sailed, and context matters anyway.
The deeper point is about what happens when you design a financial system without assuming that your user already has everything they need to use it.
Western financial products are built on a set of assumptions so deeply embedded that most product teams don’t even notice they’re there: that users have government-issued photo ID, a verifiable address, a stable employment history, a credit file, a smartphone with reliable connectivity. Strip any one of those away and entire product categories simply break.
African fintech was built by people who couldn’t make any of those assumptions, so they didn’t. And the result is infrastructure that’s more inclusive, not because someone wrote a DEI strategy, but because the constraints demanded it.
Here’s the part that surprises some people: financial exclusion isn’t only an African problem. According to Global Finance, roughly 21% of North American adults are unbanked or underbanked. In Europe, World Bank Findex data via WSBI puts approximately 13 million adults outside the formal banking system. These aren’t hypothetical edge cases. They’re real people, many of them in Birmingham, Chicago and rural France, who are paying more for basic financial services, missing out on benefits that require direct debits, and locked out of credit products because the system wasn’t designed with them in mind.
If Western institutions are serious about financial inclusion, and increasingly they have to be, looking at what’s already been built and proven in Nairobi, Accra, and Kampala seems like an obvious place to start.
The future of financial infrastructure isn’t being drafted in a San Francisco whiteboard session. It’s already running in places that couldn’t afford to wait.
A word to engineers who’ve been on that side of the problem
If you’ve built payments or financial products in Africa, or anywhere with real infrastructure constraints and users who genuinely depended on what you shipped, I want to say something plainly: that background is more valuable than most hiring pipelines currently recognise.
It’s easy to feel like the “real” innovation is happening elsewhere, that you’re working on a harder version of a smaller problem. That framing is wrong. The skills you’ve built from working in constrained environments, writing code where failure has immediate consequences for real people, are exactly what this industry needs and currently undersupplies.
Financial systems globally are getting more complex, not less. Reliability matters more, not less. The engineers who know from experience how to build things that actually work under pressure are the ones this field is going to lean on.
That’s not a niche. That’s just competence that was forged somewhere most people weren’t paying attention.
References
- GhIPSS Instant Pay Emerges as Catalyst in Ghana’s Digital Payments Surge — GhIPSS: https://www.ghipss.net/media-center/news-article/142-ghipss-instant-pay-emerges-as-catalyst-in-ghana-s-digital-payments-surge-2
- Mobile Money Handles GH₵4.54 Trillion in 2025, Far Outpacing Traditional Payments — The High Street Journal: https://thehighstreetjournal.com/mobile-money-handles-4-54tn-cedis-in-2025/
- Operational Guidelines for Open Banking in Nigeria, March 2023 — Central Bank of Nigeria: https://www.cbn.gov.ng/Out/2023/CCD/Operational Guidelines for Open Banking in Nigeria.pdf
- Mobile-Phone Technology Powers Saving Surge in Developing Economies — World Bank, July 2025: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2025/07/16/mobile-phone-technology-powers-saving-surge-in-developing-economies
- World’s Most Unbanked Countries — Global Finance Magazine: https://gfmag.com/data/worlds-most-unbanked-countries/
- Number of Unbanked Adult EU Citizens More Than Halved — WSBI-ESBG, 2022: https://www.wsbi-esbg.org/number-of-unbanked-adult-eu-citizens-more-than-halved-in-the-last-four-years
