Africa’s largest fintech company, Flutterwave, has acquired Nigerian open banking startup Mono in an all-stock deal valued between 25 million dollars and 40 million dollars, marking one of the rare notable exits in African fintech and positioning the payments giant to build a comprehensive financial services infrastructure comparable to global players like Stripe and Visa.
The acquisition brings together two of Africa’s leading fintech infrastructure companies. Flutterwave operates one of the continent’s widest payments networks across more than 30 countries, while Mono, often described as the Plaid for Africa, has built application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow businesses to access bank data, initiate payments and verify customers.
Mono has raised about 17.5 million dollars from investors, including Tiger Global, General Catalyst, and Target Global. Sources close to the deal indicated that the acquisition allowed all investors to at least recoup their capital, with some early backers realizing returns of up to 20 times their initial investment. Both Y Combinator backed companies count Tiger Global, which led investments in Flutterwave’s Series C and Mono’s Series A rounds, among their common backers.
Under the terms of the acquisition, Mono will continue to operate independently, with no changes to its leadership structure, team, or day-to-day operations. The arrangement enables strategic alignment rather than operational control, allowing Mono to maintain its pace of innovation while contributing its open banking infrastructure to Flutterwave’s expanded platform.
According to CEO Abdulhamid Hassan, nearly all Nigerian digital lenders now rely on Mono’s infrastructure. The company claims to have powered more than eight million bank account linkages, covering roughly 12 percent of Nigeria’s banked population. It also delivered 100 billion financial data points to lending companies and processed millions in direct bank payments. Customers include Visa backed Moniepoint and GIC backed PalmPay.
Hassan stated that Mono, which according to Pitchbook raised 15 million dollars in Series A at a 50 million dollar post money valuation in 2021, was not forced into a sale and is on track toward profitability this year. With significant cash reserves, he explained that raising another round would have introduced new valuation and growth expectations in a challenging funding environment.
For Flutterwave, the deal deepens vertical integration beyond its core payments business. The company can now offer onboarding and identity checks, bank account verification, data driven risk assessment, and one time or recurring bank payments within a single technology stack.
Commenting on the acquisition, Olugbenga ‘GB’ Agboola, Founder and CEO of Flutterwave, said, “This acquisition reflects how we think about the future of financial infrastructure in Africa. Payments, data, and trust cannot exist in silos. Open banking provides the connective tissue, and Mono has built critical infrastructure in this space”.
Agboola emphasized that the transaction allows Flutterwave to expand what is possible for businesses operating across African markets while staying grounded in security, compliance and local relevance. He framed the acquisition as a strategic bet on Africa’s next phase of fintech growth.
Hassan stated, “We built Mono to unlock Africa’s Open Banking potential, and since our first partnership with Flutterwave in 2021 and working together over the years, we’ve seen the power of a coordinated effort towards this goal”. He noted that combining Mono’s capabilities across financial data access, direct bank payments and identity verification with Flutterwave’s unmatched scale creates something more defensible and comprehensive.
Hassan explained that joining Flutterwave positions Mono to scale quickly once regulatory barriers fall, noting that Flutterwave already operates across dozens of African markets with local licenses, enterprise customers and compliance teams in place.
The acquisition reflects a growing recognition that the next phase of Africa’s payments growth will be driven less by card rails and more by bank-based, authenticated, and locally relevant payment methods. By integrating Mono’s open banking APIs, Flutterwave strengthens its ability to support faster onboarding, improved verification, reduced fraud and seamless account to account payments.
The collaboration also creates a pathway for expanding into richer alternative payment methods, authenticated payment flows and, over time, open banking enabled stablecoin use cases. Businesses gain access to infrastructure that simplifies compliance heavy processes such as identity checks and bank verification, while improving conversion and reliability at scale.
Market observers indicate the deal reflects a broader shift within Africa’s fintech industry, where firms are increasingly prioritizing scale and ecosystem control over independent expansion. Unlike developed markets, much of Africa still lacks robust credit reporting systems, forcing digital lenders to depend heavily on alternative data sources to assess borrower risk.
The transaction mirrors earlier consolidation attempts in global fintech infrastructure, including Visa’s failed acquisition of Plaid in 2020, which was blocked by United States regulators. Hassan cited that deal as evidence that combining data infrastructure with payment rails can unlock significant scale.
The deal also echoes recent consolidation between South African fintechs Lesaka and Adumo, signaling a broader inflection point for African fintech where startups that once aspired to become standalone giants may increasingly find better outcomes by integrating into scaled platforms. The transaction was advised by The Chrysalis Advisors Africa.
Flutterwave said the integration would also simplify compliance processes for businesses while offering developers a unified environment that combines payments and financial data. The company added that the move supports regulatory goals around standardization and data protection, citing adherence to global security frameworks including Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) and ISO 27001.
