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This is a Notadeepdive x Fintech Is Easy crossover episode, which means two newsletters get to annoy you at once. If you missed the earlier comps — Afrobeats, Nollywood, the Premier League table — catch up.

The World Cup kicks off today, and the Super Eagles have saved my “2026 World Cup” group chat tens of thousands of dollars by not qualifying. No flights to book, no jerseys to buy, so we now have to contend with being disappointed by the serial chokers: the Netherlands, Portugal, England, Belgium. Pick your poison.

Even the Pope got in on the fun this week, reminding star players to pass the ball. So while we wait for Ronaldo’s first knockout-round goal, let’s name a squad we can actually trust: Nigeria’s fintech starting XI.

The rules are simple. Position matters, not just fame. A striker who can’t defend doesn’t go in defence, no matter how big the valuation. And as always, this is very unserious analysis.

We’re playing a 4-3-3.

GK — NIBSS

Every save in Nigerian fintech is actually a NIBSS save. The keeper is the one player who is never allowed an off day, because when this one goes down, the entire league stops. You have lived through those afternoons when transfers hang in the air like a Pickford clearance. One of the best real-time payment systems in the world is still waiting for its flowers. Keepers are used to that.

RB — Paga

The veteran fullback. Was patrolling the agent-banking flank before half this squad was incorporated. Doesn’t bomb forward much these days, but positionally flawless; you only ever notice a good fullback when he’s missing.

CB — Interswitch (captain)

The armband was never up for debate. Charting since 2002, profitable, and reads the game easily. The forwards are louder, but when the ball has to go through, it goes through Interswitch.

CB — GTBank

The defensive veteran. Was doing digital banking before half this squad had a CAC registration, and Squad shows the legs haven’t gone. Doesn’t chase the ball, doesn’t dive in; just stands where the danger is going to be and lets the danger embarrass itself. Banks aren’t supposed to make this team, but try taking GTBank off the pitch and see how the defence holds.

LB — Kuda

The modern attacking fullback: electric going forward, occasionally caught upfield with its lending play and routine downtime notifications. The UK move means it’s technically playing in Europe now. The talent is obvious; the defensive discipline is a work in progress.

CM — Moniepoint

The box-to-box engine. Covers every blade of grass — POS, payroll, lending, SME banking — wins every duel, and still posts big numbers at the end of the season. The unicorn valuation makes it the first name on the team sheet.

CM — Paystack

The deep-lying playmaker. Doesn’t run much, doesn’t shout, but every attack in this ecosystem flows through its passing range. Signed by a bigger club (Stripe) yet still moves like it’s independent. Zap is the attempt to add goals to all those assists but the jury’s still out on that one.

AM — Flutterwave

The mercurial number 10. On its day, the most gifted player on the pitch with global reach, big-stage pedigree, and highlight reels for days. Also leads the league in yellow cards, and the disciplinary record follows it from country to country. You start it anyway, because the ceiling is too high to leave on the bench.

RW — LemFi

The pacey winger is doing its best football abroad. Hugs the diaspora touchline, beats established cross-border remittance companies at their own game, and whips remittances into the box at rates and speeds that have everyone else suddenly demanding to play wide and do remittances.

ST — OPay

The poacher nobody admits to rating. “I don’t even use OPay,” you say, as it scores its 30th of the season. It’s in every box, on every street, topping every download and NIBBS NIP chart.

LW — Grey

The Lamine Yamal of the squad. Young enough that the veterans remember its debut, already confident enough to take on the adults — Stablecoins, the banks, multicurrency accounts, business banking, cross-border banking itself — and win in multiple markets. Moves money across the world like it’s a street game: tricks, nutmegs, features pulled out of nowhere. The scary part is the ceiling. It hasn’t even peaked.

The Super Sub

PiggyVest (the closer — comes on in the 70th minute to lock down whatever you’ve saved)

MANAGER — CBN

Tactical instructions arrive by circular, occasionally at half-time, sometimes reversing the instructions from the first half. Nobody knows the formation until the press conference, and even then. But say what you want: every player on this pitch is here because the gaffer licensed them to play.

I’ve named my XI. Now do your worst in the comments: who got snubbed, who’s playing out of position, and who deserves the armband instead. If your favourite didn’t make the squad, that’s between you and the manager.

This belongs in the group chat. You know the one.

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Around here, we talk about the idea that lending is easy. Getting customers to repay on time is usually where things get a little sticky. Since most customers are subprime borrowers who have no collateral, digital lenders must have their wits about them. At some point, a part of the industry decided that fear was a good solution to this willingness-to-pay problem.

That means when you install a digital lending app, it asks permission to scrape your contacts, photos, and call logs. And when you fall behind on repayment, you’ll learn what that permission was for. Prepare to have messages sent to your mother, boss, or some other unfortunate random contact announcing that you’re a thief and a debtor.

None of what I’ve just described is a secret. The Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) has spent years documenting it. Between 2023 and 2024, it delisted 47 unregistered loan apps with Google’s help and placed dozens more on a watchlist, eventually convening a joint task force with NITDA, the police, the ICPC, the EFCC and the National Human Rights Commission to deal with apps that took customers’ contacts and images and used them to harass, intimidate and shame them.

By the time the FCCPC sat down to write a comprehensive rulebook, every serious person agreed it was about time.

The rule was the Digital, Electronic, Online and Non-Traditional Consumer Lending Regulations (DEON), and it took effect on 21 July 2025, with full enforcement from January 2026. The rules had the obvious right things like mandatory registration of digital lenders, clear disclosure of rates before disbursement, a ban on contact-harvesting, and a ban on shaming borrowers to force repayment. If you have read a loan-app harassment story, you’ll get the sense that DEON should have arrived years earlier.

Which makes what happened next peculiar.

Buried in a rule written for digital lenders was a decision to classify airtime lending as consumer lending.

And airtime lending is a different animal from payday loans. When you run out of airtime and still need to make a call, your network provider offers you ₦100 and you repay at your next recharge, plus a fee. There is no app harvesting your contacts, no recovery agent, no shame.

The telco takes its money back from your next top-up. Like most good technology, it works so smoothly that the customer never thinks about the machinery underneath. I wrote about that machinery last August, because it is a genuinely good business that pulled an entire telecoms subsector — Value Added Services, or VAS — back from the dead.

If VAS was on the ropes before airtime lending, they had it coming. These were the people behind the caller tunes, the horoscope SMS, the “win a car” promos. For years, their trade was the unsolicited subscription and services you never asked for but were signed up for anyway, debiting your airtime.

In 2016, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) gave the networks and their VAS partners until June to stop sending unsolicited messages or face a ₦5 million fine plus ₦500,000 for every additional day, and gave subscribers an option to opt out with a Do-Not-Disturb code.

In December 2018, after a two-year audit of call records and subscription logs across every network, the NCC concluded that a huge share of VAS subscriptions had never been voluntary, and that some providers had built deliberate mechanisms to force-subscribe people and drain their airtime without consent. The regulator put the illegal charges at around ₦36 billion in just the five months to December 2018, ordered refunds, and threatened to suspend or decommission the offending platforms outright.

So when airtime lending came along and offered the VAS industry an honest, enormous line of business, the people in it did the sensible thing and kept their heads down.

The sector is not yet spotless, and one fair criticism of airtime lending is that it operates entirely outside the formal credit system, so a Nigerian who borrows and repays faithfully for years builds no credit history a bank can see, and the data on his reliability sits with the platform rather than a bureau. But a business that advances small sums and gets paid back is a long way from one that forcibly debited millions of people for horoscopes.

With DEON due to come into force in early 2026, the airtime lenders carried on as though it had nothing to do with them. The assumption was that airtime is a telecoms service, telecoms is the NCC’s house, and a consumer-protection regulator surely couldn’t redraw it. But the ground was shifting, and almost nobody in the sector was looking down.

They looked down on April 2nd, when the FCCPC directed MTN, Airtel, Globacom, and 9mobile to comply with DEON immediately. Rather than risk the penalties, the operators switched off airtime lending. A rule written to stop loan apps from terrorising defaulters and sanitise digital lending had, as its first visible act, taken emergency airtime away.

I wrote in April that a cynical person might notice Nigeria has never met a healthy pool of cash without wondering how to insert a middleman into it. I’m looking at you, ARCON.

The FCCPC’s case for pulling airtime into DEON was not, in fact, harassment; its argument was competition. The Commission says its findings showed that some operators ran “exclusionary third-party technical arrangements” in breach of the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Act, exclusive deals that wired a single technical partner into a network’s airtime-lending pipe and shut rivals out.

DEON’s remedy followed from that diagnosis. Any operator lending airtime must use at least two service-activation providers, one of them fully Nigerian-owned, cannot strike a lending deal with a dominant intermediary without the Commission’s approval, and may not enter exclusive arrangements that foreclose competitors. The framing was free-market, and the rules, the Commission said, sought to open the market to local participants alongside foreign partners.

The trouble with this remedy is that the competition FCCPC claimed to be angling for actually arrived while the Commission was busy engineering it.

Commercial banks like GTCO launched a Quick Airtime Loan, lending ₦100 to ₦10,000 over your *737# code at 2.95% a month against the telcos’ 15%, running it on its own USSD rails and HabariPay’s payment infrastructure, with repayment pulled automatically from your account on the next inflow.

It asked no one’s permission, partnered with no telco, and sought no airtime-lending licence. It was a bank; advancing small sums and recovering them from an account it already holds is the most ordinary thing a bank does.

When a vacuum opened in April with the suspension of airtime lending, more banks jumped in; Access, Zenith, UBA, FirstBank, and FCMB all pushed their own airtime-loan codes within weeks. A market the FCCPC was trying to legislate into competition was, at the same moment, being competed for at a fifth of the price by firms its regulation never had to touch.

The banks aren’t a perfect substitute, of course, because you need a funded bank account to use them, so they don’t reach the unbanked subscriber the telco model serves at ₦0 balance. But the direction is that the thing the FCCPC said it wanted — more players, a cheaper product, the customer better off — happened from a class of competitor the rules didn’t anticipate, the moment there was a gap to fill.

A competition regulator’s job is to lower the barriers and punish the abuse — break the exclusive contract, ban the tying arrangement, open the field — and then let whoever wants to compete arrive on their own terms.

Clearing the field enables competition. Deciding that an airtime lender must use two intermediaries, that one of them must hold a particular nationality, and that the Commission must approve each arrangement in the chain, is the regulator specifying the number and identity of the players rather than the conditions of play. The first produces a GTBank at 2.95%. The second produces a queue for a licence.

You could grant the FCCPC its entire diagnosis — exclusive arrangements existed, concentration was real, foreign firms held data on millions of Nigerians that never touched a local credit bureau — and still say the cure was wrong. An enabling environment doesn’t hand-pick its beneficiaries. The surest sign that a rule is about competition rather than capture is that it tells you what conduct is forbidden and then falls silent on who gets to show up.

So, a rule almost everyone wanted went to court over the part almost no one needed. WASPAN, the association of Nigerian NCC-licensed firms that run this business, argued that consumer protection does not stretch to redesigning a telecoms market, which is the NCC’s remit.

Airtel and Glo restored airtime lending soon in late May, but MTN has not rejoined the party.

The FCCPC had a real problem, a good rule, and a public that wanted it enforced. It had, in the loan-app provisions, exactly the tools to clear the field: ban the abuse, force disclosure, open the market, and let the banks and the fintechs and the aggregators arrive on their own.

Instead, the Commission reached past all of it for a clause that specified who could stand in the airtime pipe and what passport they had to hold, lost the rule it had taken years to build, and stalled a service millions of people use to stay connected. The loan apps it was actually written to stop are, presumably, still out there, texting somebody’s mother and accusing them of being thieves.

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TOGETHER WITH CREDIT DIRECT

The answer might surprise you.

The Nigeria Consumer Credit Insights Report breaks down who borrows, how much, for what, and what it reveals about financial behaviour across the country.

The answer to that question is just the beginning.

Read It Here

Nigeria’s BNPL flavour

The point of Buy Now, Pay Later is that you want something. A coat, concert tickets, an iPhone 17 Promax. You'd like to have it now and deal with the cost later, in some abstract future. Klarna built an empire on this at the checkout pages of Nike, H&M, and, lately, Walmart. The things Americans most often finance this way are televisions, appliances, and the odd sofa. It's a way to buy what you can't afford and tell people that it works for your cash flow.

In Nigeria, people are using Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) in counterintuitive ways. Most of the people using BNPL don’t have salaries.

Almost half of all the BNPL transactions in Credit Direct’s consumer credit report are from self-employed people, against under a third for people who draw a wage. The self-employed people even borrow bigger, which sounds backwards.

The premise of lending to a consumer is that the consumer has a payslip you can point at. Here, the people with none of that are the main customers, and you should see what they’re buying.

Top of the list are mid-range Android phones that cost ₦130,000 to ₦280,000, which the report calls the sweet spot. These are the most expensive phones you can get without putting up cash. (iPhones turn up too, albeit as a smaller slice, bought by people who could mostly have paid outright and chose to pay in bits anyway. That's the one corner of the Nigerian market doing the American thing.)

Picture the customer. You sell things like phone cases, frozen chicken, ankara, or work hours as a dispatch rider. While you don’t earn a salary, there’s a trickle of small payments that arrive when they arrive. So the phone is the shop where the orders come in, and where you check whether the transfer actually went through. But it costs more than you clear in a month.

When a factory borrows to buy a machine, we call it asset finance and give it a banker. When the woman selling provisions on a small scale borrows to buy a phone, that’s the Nigerian flavour of Buy Now, Pay Later.

M-KOPA has put more than $1.6 billion of credit into the hands of everyday earners — hairdressers, boda riders, carpenters, people with steady work and no payslip — mostly to buy smartphones, repaid in daily instalments that map how money reaches people like that. It says most of its customers use the phone to earn.

If you miss your payments, the phone switches off. It feels a little sinister, but it’s effective.

Asked how long they want to repay, most borrowers choose the longest term on offer. The monthly figure on anything shorter is one their cash flow can't survive, which is, again, why they're paying in instalments at all. The product assumes someone spreading out a treat. The person on the other end is rationing a business expense.

Maybe the self-employed borrow this way only because nobody else will lend to them, a phone is just a phone, and I'm reading a small-business epic into people buying Androids. Maybe. The Nigerian data can't see why anyone buys anything; it sees who, what, and for how long.

In America, Buy Now, Pay Later is sliding downhill, and people have started putting groceries on it. In Nigeria, BNPL was always a small-business loan for the millions who'll never be offered one.

Read Credit Direct’s Consumer Insights Report here.

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Ngozi Chukwu, the author of this newsletter edition, will begin publishing “Footnote” on Notadeepdive every Thursday. She’ll write about food delivery, fintech and whatever else captures her imagination. That’s one more reason to subscribe:

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TOGETHER WITH CREDIT DIRECT

The answer might surprise you.

The Nigeria Consumer Credit Insights Report breaks down who borrows, how much, for what, and what it reveals about financial behaviour across the country.

The answer to that question is just the beginning.

Read It Here

Restaurant catfishing

Every time you use a food delivery app like Chowdeck, Glovo, or Swoop, the technology works so well that you don’t have to think about it. You want food, you know the restaurant exists, and you cannot be bothered to leave your chair/bed.

Somewhere in this arrangement is the assumption that the food delivery platform has an active relationship with the restaurant and that the food you receive comes from the restaurant you selected. It’s reinforced every time you walk into that same restaurant and see dispatch riders with their branded t-shirts picking up orders.

That arrangement has recently become a matter of public debate.

Three times in the last six months, Nigerians on social media have experienced collective panic over what can only be described as “restaurant catfishing,” the strange idea that the restaurant you’re ordering from may not be the restaurant.

The first two times, there was an impostor. In December, Corporate Ewa alleged someone had registered its name on Glovo and was buying food from roadside kitchens near Ojuelegba to fill orders, with one customer reporting food poisoning. Glovo delisted the account and promised an investigation.

In May, Techpoint built a fictitious restaurant, registered it on Glovo and Chowdeck, and got an order out the door before either platform flagged it. Both incidents are fraud. Fraud is easy to get upset about, and because it has a villain, the obvious fix is to check who you are onboarding/fix your KYC process.

Norma was the third time, and here, there was no impostor.

On May 28, the Lagos suya spot asked Chowdeck to remove its name, logo, and menu because it had never agreed to be on Chowdeck. How did customers receive orders from a restaurant that hadn’t consented to listing on Chowdeck?

The explanation came this week with Chowdeck clarifying that an agent it calls a shopper stands near popular restaurants, buys the food a customer ordered through the app, and hands it to a rider, no agreement with the restaurant required.

To clear up the confusion, it will now add badges — Verified, Awaiting Verification, Shopper — so you can tell a partner from a shop Chowdeck is merely buying from. Chowdeck framed it as a vulnerability in a system built to support small businesses.

The most obvious question, which many publications have asked (not a bad thing!), is “Is it fair to make a business carry the reputational risk of a listing it never approved?”

But assisted fulfillment, a.k.a. using a shopper, is not really a question of fairness to restaurants because, at face value, the restaurant loses no money.

But money isn’t everything. Restaurants whose items get delivered without their consent have no control over delivery temperature, food handling, or timing. There’s also the reality of customers blaming the restaurant for a bad delivery it never authorized. It’s entirely possible to lose significant brand equity because of a delivery process it has no control over.

Every order Norma didn’t consent to fulfill builds Chowdeck’s ratings and retention. Fast-growing restaurants, like Norma, which launched its fifth location last year, that are worth taking these customers from are exactly the ones with enough pull to refuse to list on Chowdeck.

But assisted fulfilment is cheap customer acquisition for a wannabe super-app because the brand that’s pulling the customer’s attention belongs to someone else. So, the Shopper badge isn’t protection for the restaurant, and it’s not because anyone cares about small businesses. It’s Chowdeck’s claim on a Norma customer that Norma will never meet.

Norma keeps the full counter price of every catfished order because it pays no commission and runs no promotion. A restaurant that actually signs with a food delivery service will pay for the privilege of demand generation.

When Lucky Boy, a Pasadena burger stand, sued Postmates in 2021, it set the commission at roughly 30% of every order.

On a per-order basis, the shopper model is bad: Chowdeck collects no commission, pays a shopper’s time, and floats cash to buy items at full counter price. It only works when you accept that the food is the cost of acquisition and the customer is the asset.

This makes the list of catfished restaurants a proxy for Chowdeck’s leverage. The unconsented restaurants are a map of the supply Chowdeck has demand for but cannot get under contract. While conventional wisdom about delivery apps is that they aggregate demand and restaurants compete to supply it, the Nigerian restaurant market is small enough that the demand sits with the brands, and the food delivery apps end up competing. Case in point, all delivery apps have a rotating cast of deals with Chicken Republic and The Place, suggesting the leverage these big franchises have.

American food delivery startups ran this assisted play on the way up, and the way it played out is a cautionary tale.

In 2015, In-N-Out sued DoorDash for delivering its burgers under an imitation of its logo after being told to stop. Lucky Boy said Postmates posted wrong prices under its name, told customers it was closed when it was open, and steered people searching for Lucky Boy toward restaurants that paid. Grubhub built much of its catalogue this way; the FTC found last year that as many as half its listed restaurants, up to 325,000, were there without consent, that it tended to remove them only when threatened, and that it treated the listing as a lever to sell a partnership. The penalty was $140 million, but Grubhub eventually paid $25 million because that’s all it could afford. Is there a Nigerian In-N-Out with the standing and appetite to sue, or an FCCPC with the appetite to act as the FTC did?

The delivery platforms had compelling incentives to “steal” the customer. DoorDash did not post a profit as a public company until late 2024, and it got there on scale built largely in these grey years of assisted fulfilment. Delivering food is a bad business.

“The economics are tough in this market because the costs are very high and there is plenty of competition, so there is downward pressure on the commissions that we make and upward pressure on marketing costs because everyone is fighting for customers.” - Francis Dufay

Which is why you see a lot of these platforms talk about building super apps. They open dark stores, buy a startup that sells inventory software and hardware, all to one end: owning the relationship with the customer.

You could argue the relationship isn’t worth much yet and that in a market this thin, assisted fulfilment is scrappy catalogue-filling rather than a land grab.

But that objection answers itself. Assisted fulfilment is only worth the legal and reputational exposure to someone who already believes the customer is the prize, which is pretty much the super-app thesis. Chowdeck is wagering that the relationship it is building on Norma’s name will be worth more than the strain of the brand pushing back or going to court.

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The three-body theory

Sometimes the corporate world aligns the incentives of three otherwise unconnected entities.

Imagine the first entity as a late-stage startup that needs cash but doesn’t want to raise money at a down round. The second entity is a government that needs a very big and public technology-sector win. The third entity is really a hanger-on; a stock exchange that needs an Initial Public Offering (IPO) to prove its startup board has not been a complete failure.

The startup’s problem is that its old and rich valuation was possible when it still had a stronger story. But no matter what story it tells, it’ll need new buyers of that story sooner or later. The new buyers will poke and prod the numbers until it’s a third of what it once was. It could also list abroad and discover that public-market investors are less sentimental than private backers. A sale is almost out of the question because of said rich valuation.

So the startup needs money, but not just any money. It needs money that takes its word at it, without all the aforementioned poking and prodding.

The government has a different problem: it cannot take pictures of reforms. A factory opening, or a bell-ringing ceremony with a founder and a stock exchange official, can deliver hard evidence of efforts.

With technology advertised as the future of many emerging economies for fifteen years, a listing of a recognisable name on the local exchange, even in a dual listing, is premium photo-op material. The president will shake the founder’s hand, the exchange gets its listing, and the startup gets its money. Incentives are perfectly aligned.

The trouble is that IPOs are complex. The companies large enough to matter have spent the last decade structuring themselves to be incorporated abroad, dollar-denominated, and bound for foreign exchanges. The government cannot summon a listable champion out of thin air; it can only endorse one that already exists.

If the big win from this kind of endorsement is public approval, then you need to sequence this properly. Maybe a meeting at the presidential office, a trip abroad, and something with ministers.

Yet, each of these has to be a step the company wants to take, because this has to be a company large enough to make the endorsement worth giving, yet in a position to welcome friendly capital, and flexible enough to accept the ceremony that comes with it. Remember, what the government wants out of this is a recognisable win.

The exchange, which is the smallest party in the room, has a rather straightforward need: a splashy IPO. While the exchange has no leverage, it has patience and a willingness to accept a dual listing. The alternative is no technology IPO.

Welcome to the entirely hypothetical Three-Body Theory (please do not take capital raising advice from a newsletter!).

The Three-Body Theory is a situation in which three parties with different problems need the same transaction to happen. The startup needs capital without a down round; the government needs a public technology-sector win, and the exchange needs one credible listing.

Most people think of that transaction as the IPO, but the transaction is the round before it. It is the money that gets the company from its current problem to the bell-ringing ceremony everyone believes is coming. In one sense, this is just a bridge round.

For the startup, the round reduces pressure because cash buys time, which is a better alternative to raising money at unfavorable terms. If it can raise enough money before the IPO, it does not have to rush into a listing window that may be unkind or accept a private round that tells everyone the last valuation was a little too generous.

Also, the useful thing about strategic money is that it does not have to be all the money. It only has to arrive first.

Once the cheque is in, other money has a reason to gather. Nobody has to say they are joining a round designed to postpone a harder conversation about valuation. That is the elegance of the bridge.

The startup says strategic capital; the government says innovation, while the exchange says market deepening. Existing investors will say continued support.

The problem is that the three bodies do not share a calendar. The startup wants process, controlled disclosure, careful language, and investor alignment. No serious company wants its funding announcement treated like a ribbon-cutting. But the government wants credit and wants it now, so there’s bound to be friction there.

The existing investors, in this theory, are watching with the patience of people who know the best outcome needs compromise. You can hold on to your ideals, but forcing a company into a bad IPO is not a good outcome.

A bridge round may dilute investors, but that’s hardly fatal.

If the round keeps an IPO alive, buys time, and allows everyone believing the old valuation is still within reach, dilution is an acceptable tradeoff.

Nobody gets everything, but everybody gets enough to keep them happy.

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Ships vs Speedboats

There are two ways to think about banks and fintechs.

The first is the ship. It’s large, visible, regulated, full of people, impossible to ignore, and not built for sharp turns. Ships are slow, not because their captains are stupid, but because they have the responsibility of balancing people, history, compliance departments, regulators, risk committees, and millions of customers who will bust a nerve if that ₦10,000 transfer hangs.

The second is the speedboat. Small, noisy, exciting, occasionally reckless. It can turn fast, crash into the side of the market, repaint itself…it can move fast and break things.

If you run a ship and you see speedboats cutting through the water, your first instinct could be irritation or envy. Your instinct, if you’re Segun Agbaje, is to build one.

A few days ago, Agbaje told Nairametrics that GTCO is no longer worried about fintech competition.

“Everybody was really nervous about fintech, so we built our own speedboat. That’s Habari.”

“Habari is competing very, very effectively and it means we are not scared about the threat of fintechs any longer. We have a very strong engine to compete with them.”

Agbaje has been talking about this speedboat years before HabariPay became an enviable revenue line in GTCO’s annual report. At some point, this speedboat was a theory about what banking would become, and at other points, it represented theories about fintech valuations, payment income, and why banks could no longer judge their competition by looking at other banks.

For a while, it was also a theory about music, shopping, videos, books, friends, bill-splitting, utility payments, and 10,000 small businesses in a super app built by one of Nigeria’s most profitable banks.

Those theories, a.k.a the first version of Habari, did not win.

By 2020, Agbaje’s fintech anxiety was public. In an interview, he said competitor analysis could no longer stop at banks. Banks had to look at fintechs, telcos, FMCG companies, and even betting companies because anyone with mobile wallets and customer data had become a potential competitor in financial services.

He was especially blunt about the pace of change. “Three years ago, we were talking about this like it was way, way in the future. It’s here today.”

The reason for urgency was the great age of fintech unbundling. PiggyVest took savings and made it social and savvy. Carbon, FairMoney and others took consumer lending and made it instant and easy. Paystack and Flutterwave made online payments stop feeling like painful negotiations with your bank’s e-business team. OPay came with distribution and a frightening willingness to spend their way to scale.

At Social Media Week Lagos in 2020, Agbaje pointed out that GTBank, one of Nigeria’s best-valued banks, was trading at around one time book value, while payment companies were valued at 30 times earnings. “What is there not to like about this space?” he asked.

He also cited Frost & Sullivan’s projection that Nigerian fintech revenues would grow from $153.1 million in 2017 to $543.3 million by 2022, and drew the obvious conclusion that 30% of banking income was at risk.

If the market was going to reward payments like software and punish banking like banking, GTBank needed to move some of its economics into the right bucket.

The bank already operated GTPay, GTCollections, QuickCredit and Habari. It was number one in NIP inflows and outflows for a period in 2020, with more than 18% of outflows and almost 17% of inflows. Agbaje told analysts Paystack might start bigger and know more on day one, but GTBank would “bridge that gap very quickly.” GTBank was going to win payments “very easily.”

TechCabal’s 2020 framing was that GTBank’s fintech ambitions could lead to a future billion-dollar IPO. Worldpay, an example Agbaje has cited, started inside a bank and became a huge payments company.

The public mood on banks venturing into fintech was split.

Nigeria’s Tech founders generally believed banks were ships; too slow to beat startups at their own game. Bank people believed startups were underestimating distribution and the violence of cheap deposits. Agbaje believed GTBank could have the advantages of the ship with a speedboat alongside.

When GTBank launched Habari in November 2018, Agbaje went out of his way to say it was not a bank. Habari was Nigeria’s largest platform for music, shopping, lifestyle content and more. It had music, videos, books, shopping from over 10,000 small businesses, friend discovery, bill splitting, transfers and utility payments. GTBank said it was “less about us as a bank and more about our customers and everything they need to enable their lifestyle.”

People might not want a bank, but they still needed banking. The winning company would not necessarily be the one with the best branch network or the largest loan book. It would be the one embedded in the customer’s daily life, catching payments, commerce, content, credit and identity as they moved through the same interface.

It was a very 2018 idea; a time when everyone wanted to be a platform/superapp. The broad idea was to take the boring licensed activity and wrap it in something shinier and more social (it sounds like the kind of pitch old people believe as a way of keeping up with the times).

If Habari worked, GTBank would own the customer context around the payment. Habari did not become the Nigerian WeChat.

The problem with bank-built lifestyle platforms is that customers can already smell the “trying to be cool” by committee setup. Nobody wakes up looking for a bank-owned place to stream music, read books, shop and find friends.

By 2021, GTBank had become GTCO, a holding company built to house banking and non-banking subsidiaries. The fintech ambition morphed into HabariPay, and the consumer super-app dream gave way to HabariPay, with a practical flagship product called Squad that would compete in payments.

HabariPay’s business today is payments infrastructure. It runs a payment gateway that processes transactions through virtual accounts, USSD, cards and bank transfers. It also has switching services and value-added services like bills, airtime and bulk SMS through licensed aggregators. Squad gives merchants payment links, storefronts, POS terminals and other tools for getting paid. It is a much better business than the original Habari.

In 2025, HabariPay made ₦12.9 billion in operating income, up from ₦5.8 billion the year before.

Profit after tax rose from ₦3.8 billion to ₦9.7 billion. Operating expenses doubled to ₦3.2 billion.

HabariPay had ₦12.9 billion in operating income and spent ₦3.2 billion to run the business. If it was a standalone venture-backed fintech trying to hire aggressively, subsidise customers, fight fraud, pay cloud bills, buy POS terminals, build a field force and advertise its way into market share, that cost profile would be impossible.

GTCO has found a way to make money in fintech without behaving like a venture-backed fintech. It did not need to win every consumer’s wallet or become the main app on a trader’s phone. Most importantly, it did not need to subsidise a generation into changing their behaviour.

It took the route of merchants, payment acceptance, group relationships, operational discipline, and a cost base that still looks like GTBank.

So this victory speech needs a footnote.

HabariPay is profitable, but it is small. Its ₦9.7 billion profit was about 1.1% of GTCO’s ₦865 billion group profit in 2025. Its ₦12.9 billion operating income is nice, but it is still a rounding error beside the mothership.

It’s a good holding-company story but it is not yet a “we beat fintech” story.

The consumer wallet war feels fought and won. OPay reportedly had over 50 million registered users in Nigeria by mid-2025, with around 10 million daily active users. PalmPay claims 35 million users. Moniepoint, which started from the merchant side and has been moving into personal banking, recorded $264.51 million in 2023 revenue, processes more than one billion transactions monthly and serves ten million businesses and individuals across Nigeria.

GTCO has not built OPay, PalmPay or Moniepoint. It has built a profitable payments subsidiary.

GTCO never needed to win the entire fintech market. It needed to stop fintechs from eating profitable pieces of its business without a response. On that narrow thesis, HabariPay is progress.

The less generous reading is that Agbaje has moved the goalpost from “we will win payments very easily” to “we are no longer scared.” Those are different claims.

There might be a lesson in there that banks rarely beat startups by becoming startups. They beat them by copying the part of the startup model that makes money, then attaching it to a cheaper balance sheet, a trusted brand and existing customer relationships.

Ships do not need to win every race against speedboats. Sometimes they just need one fast enough to stop passengers from asking why everyone else looks more alive.

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Jumia is not a doorstep delivery company

The general idea when you think of Jumia is of an e-commerce platform you visit when you want to buy, say, a new phone. You sift through a bunch of really expensive options, pay online, and it gets delivered to your doorstep in a major city like Lagos or Nairobi.

But one part of that picture isn’t completely accurate because Jumia isn’t really a doorstep delivery company. At least not anymore.

In Q1 2026, 74% of Jumia packages were fulfilled through pickup stations rather than door delivery, up from 67% a year ago. So the correct picture is: you go to Jumia, order a phone, and pick it up the same day or a few days later at a pickup station.

Skipping the last mile is a strategic masterstroke for Jumia’s unit economics. They still move products through warehouses and logistics partners, but they no longer have to send a rider to a customer’s address, call three times, and return with the package when the person isn’t home.

It’s a key reason Jumia’s fulfilment cost per physical goods order stayed flat at $2.06 even as volumes grew sharply and fuel prices increased in Nigeria and other African countries.

The mental picture of ordering from Jumia is wrong on geography, too. This is not an e-commerce company selling phones to people in Lekki, Kilimani and Zamalek. In Q1 2026, 62% of Jumia’s orders came from upcountry regions. (By “upcountry,” Jumia means regions outside its densest e-commerce markets. Places like Gaya, Okene, Yenagoa, Owerri, Wurukum, Ekpoma-Eguare and Ogijo.)

In Lagos, walking to a pickup station may be stressful because you have a ton of options. In a secondary city like Okene, where the item you want may be unavailable, overpriced or dependent on a trader who is also waiting for someone else to bring it from Lagos, walking to a pickup station is part of the bargain.

In Nigeria, Jumia added more than 80 pickup stations in Q1 2026, and its distribution network still covers only about one-third of the Nigerian population. Côte d’Ivoire, one of Jumia’s more mature markets, is closer to 60%.

Jumia is narrower, more physical, and more local.

Since taking over in November 2022, Francis Dufay has methodically killed the distractions. Jumia Food and Jumia Prime are gone. JumiaPay is no longer the center of the story; the company will stop reporting Total Payment Volume as a primary metric by Q2..

Physical goods are the business and the path to the promised land of adjusted EBIDATA breakeven by Q4 2026 and profitability by 2027.

The path to breakeven is to make the platform bigger, take more from each transaction, and stop the cost base from growing wildly.

Asked about the path to cash-flow positivity, Dufay said there are no mysterious blockers; “It’s mostly an execution game.” The company has to keep scaling the top line, improve unit economics, and reduce fixed costs in absolute terms.

As part of increasing its top line, Jumia increased commissions and take rates across most of its countries in January 2026.

This is an important shift because, less than two years ago, Jumia was still talking about keeping commissions stable so merchants would keep supplying the platform. Now, Jumia believes it has earned the right to take more because the platform is delivering more volume, better service and better access to customers.

Yet, even commissions and take rates have a ceiling, so it’s good to see that the company is increasing revenue from other business lines.

Marketing and advertising revenue grew 44% to $2.2 million, and value-added services revenue grew to $1.7 million, helped by warehousing fees from higher volumes, especially from Chinese sellers. Advertising revenue is still only about 1% of Gross Merchandise Value (GMV), and management believes there is room for improvement.

The second thing Jumia has to execute on is supply.

A pickup station does not mean much if the things people want are unavailable, expensive or slow to arrive. It’s challenging to have a catalogue that’s good enough with compelling prices.

This is why the international sellers from China and Turkey using Jumia are crucial; gross items sold from international sellers grew 87% in Q1 2026. According to Dufay, the current growth from international sellers is the result of three to four years of work. A new Chinese vendor can take more than a year or two before making a meaningful GMV and margin contribution.

So Jumia has had to convince merchants who don’t know Lagos, Nairobi, Abidjan or Accra to send inventory here. It is slow, operational work but the payoff is that these international sellers help Jumia widen its assortment. They often operate in categories like fashion, accessories and home and living, where gross profit ratios are higher. They also use more advertising and storage services, which means Jumia can monetise them beyond the basic commission.

This version of Jumia, a marketplace where merchants pay for access, storage, visibility and distribution, is one shareholders should care about.

Jumia also has to execute on cost, and because this is 2026, that involves saying AI a lot. On the Q1 earnings call, AI is mentioned 14 times.

Management says AI is being used in cybersecurity, code quality, accounting, HR reporting, logistics, customer service and seller management. Some of this is the usual public-company AI signalling, and shareholders will probably enjoy it for that reason alone.

There’s also more talk of layoffs, with a plan to let 200 people go this year. When Dufay took over at the end of 2022, Jumia had 4,318 employees. By March 2026, it had just over 1,980 employees. Nothing like talking about AI while cutting headcount to excite shareholders.

Costs rose sharply in sales and advertising to $5.1 million in Q1, and management says it views that positively because the spend is going to customer acquisition and engagement on the back of stronger product fundamentals.

There is a delicate balance in play. If you spend too little, GMV growth will slow, but spend too much, and the road to breakeven will continue to stretch ceaselessly into the horizon. Spend badly, and Jumia returns to the old problem of acquiring customers who never come back.

Dufay told analysts that Jumia’s marketing spend ratio is still lower than that of much larger emerging-market e-commerce players, and that most of the budget goes into online channels where spend can be moved daily or weekly if a market is not responding.

So the model is not simply “cut your way to profitability.” That would be easier to understand and less interesting. Jumia is trying to spend more on the parts of the business that drive GMV while cutting the parts that do not need to grow with GMV.

The business that now makes the most sense is not the one with the grandest internet story. It is the one that gets a phone case from a seller in China to a pickup station in Gaya, charges the merchant for visibility, charges for storage, takes a commission, and keeps the fulfillment cost flat.

After years of big promises, the Jumia story has become smaller and therein lies the path to profitability.

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Super app dreams

If you go to a VC today and tell them you’re looking to raise money for a food delivery startup in Nigeria, you might get walked out of the room. They have seen and heard it before and may be understandably jaded.

While Chowdeck and Glovo are giving the sector some hope, you cannot miss the issues. Restaurants do not want to pay commissions, so they pass the costs to customers who also underestimate what it truly costs to get a meal to their doorstep. A recent Substack essay about Chowdeck went viral because it captured customer frustration. Delivery fees and service fees are trending upwards, while conditions around subscription fees are changed without notice.

If a startup is constantly adding costs and changing terms under the feet of its customers, it is unlikely that unit economics are great.

Francis Dufay, Jumia’s CEO, gave the best soundbites about this business when Jumia shut down its food delivery arm in 2023. At the time Jumia killed food delivery, the business accounted for about 11% of Jumia’s GMV in the first nine months. It had also been Jumia’s fastest-growing category for years.

Dufay’s argument was that food delivery was difficult everywhere, with “challenging economics and big losses.” In Africa, the business has high costs, heavy competition, downward pressure on commissions, and rising marketing costs because everyone is fighting for the same customers.

So “we are building food delivery in Nigeria” is probably not the story you want to tell investors, and as I’ve said before, fundraising is storytelling. What’s your alternative story?

You can say food delivery is the first wedge into a much larger consumer platform, and that restaurants are really merchant acquisition, riders are logistics infrastructure, and the payment flow is really the beginning of a wallet. Repeat lunch orders are frequency and customer data is credit underwriting.

Basically, you could tell a story about a superapp.

Super apps are seductive because they turn a difficult first business into a larger constellation of businesses. The first business may have thin margins, difficult customers, operational stress, and unclear profitability. The other businesses improve the story with a theoretically larger addressable market.

Some start from payments, banking, logistics, messaging or even e-commerce. The broad ambition is to own one high-frequency relationship, then stretch it into many others.

There’s nothing better than a look at some of Nigeria’s super app dreams to understand where the next thing is.

GTCO (Habari)

GTBank launched Habari in 2018 as Nigeria’s largest platform for music, shopping, lifestyle content, and more. Segun Agbaje said the app was “less about us as a bank and more about our customers and everything they need to enable their lifestyle.”

GTBank had one of the strongest consumer banking brands in the country, and the thinking was that if fintechs were going to attack the bank from the customer experience point, GTBank could play that game too.

A customer can trust you with their salary and still not want it to be their music app, shopping mall, and cultural companion.

OPay (ORide, OFood, OEverything)

OPay had ORide, OCar, OBus, OFood, OExpress, OMall, OTrade, OKash, and the wallet at various points. OPay was building a Nigerian super app with restaurant delivery, logistics, B2C and B2B commerce, and ride-hailing, all centered around the payment product.

When Lagos restricted motorcycle ride-hailing, OPay got smaller, and well, it’s on its way to an IPO, so we know how that went.

Jumia (Marketplace)

If any African internet company could argue that one activity would reinforce the others, it was Jumia. You could buy an item, pay with JumiaPay, order food, and at some points, book hotels or even find flights.

Yet, all the verticals were spun off until we ended up with this new lean version of Jumia, which has exited, cut, and narrowed its way to this entity that now expects to break even in 2027.

MTN (Ayoba)

MTN had SIM cards, airtime, billing relationships, data, agents, and presence across African markets. It wanted to be an African answer to WhatsApp and WeChat.

Free data can make people try an app, but can it make people move their church groups, school chats, family arguments, vendor relationships, office gossip, and football banter from WhatsApp? Ayoba has now shut down.

Swoop

Swoop is a food delivery business that does not see itself as a food delivery business. The founder, Niederhoffer, references Kaspi in Kazakhstan and WeChat in China, platforms that turned a single high-frequency consumer behaviour into the rails for everything else. Food delivery is the start, with payments coming next.

“In Africa, there’s no legacy banking infrastructure. Essentially, you’re not competing with credit cards. Those are not popular, and there’s a huge opportunity.” - Niederhoffer

I don’t fault whatever you have to say to raise money.

Each of the four companies above with superapp ambitions started from a stronger position than food delivery.

Swoop’s thesis is that the destination (a payments and financial services layer) is a vacuum waiting to be filled. Of course, startups change their destination and pathways all the time, but this is certainly worth watching.

In any case, Swoop has $7.3 million and a really good story. Game on.

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MoMo’s promise vs hard reality

When ideas fail or companies struggle, it’s very easy to say, “Ah, I called it, always knew that wouldn’t work!” Yet some of those sentiments may not have been accurate when the product or company launched.

When MTN launched its mobile money service MoMo, for instance, the consensus was that it would crush existing fintechs and be a threat to banks. The believers weren’t crazy, although their frames of reference were mostly M-PESA or Mobile Money in Ghana.

The broad theory of MoMo’s inevitable domination was that with MTN’s subscribers and retail touchpoints, it would be easy to spread the gospel of their wallet. It had worked in other African countries; at the end of 2021, MTN Mobile Money was operational in about 15 countries, with 56.8 million customers completing 10 billion transactions worth roughly $240 billion.

In 2019, GTBank called telco-led payment services “a more compelling threat.” Nairametrics ran with the headline “Mobile money war: Telecoms threaten banks’ future in Nigeria” and argued that it would be unwise to bet against telcos.

By the time MTN and Airtel received approval in principle for mobile money in 2021, TechCabal argued that telcos were even better positioned than banks and fintechs to deepen mobile money penetration given their subscriber base, infrastructure, and agent networks.

MoMo Payment Service Bank (PSB) launched with a promise that customers could dial *671# on any network to open a wallet and send money to any phone number in Nigeria. It also started with more than 166,000 active agents and promised to reach unbanked and underserved Nigerians. Four years on, that promise is far from fulfilled.

This week, Techpoint reported that MTN Group plans to acquire a 60% stake in MoMo Payment Service Bank and Y’ello Digital Financial Services for a combined ₦95.5 billion. “It’s not just a sale; it’s a restructuring designed to shift control of these fintech units up to the group level while easing pressure on MTN Nigeria’s books,” Techpoint wrote.

The transaction will bring a ₦152.06 billion cash injection into the fintech subsidiaries while valuing them at ₦95.5 billion, more than twice their December 2025 carrying value. MTN Nigeria is moving more of the fintech risk, funding, and upside to MTN Group, while keeping a minority stake in case those subsidiaries improve.

A few weeks ago, we looked at MTN Nigeria’s FY 2025 numbers and saw MTN had written down the value of its fintech subsidiaries by ₦62.56 billion. MoMo had 3.7 million active wallets at the end of 2025, miles from its 30 million to 40 million target. The company had discussed “Fintech Structural Separation” and “Fintech Capital Injection” and even held an ad hoc committee meeting on “Fintech Strategy.”

As I wrote then, those were not “the agenda items of a business gliding elegantly toward destiny.”

Whatever happened with MoMo, given that its destiny seemed to be that of an inevitable segment winner?

The problem starts with the market MoMo entered. Instant payments in Nigeria were already normal, and NIBSS Instant Payment transactions had reached 5.2 billion in 2022.

In some markets, the telco wallet became the main rail. In Nigeria, NIBSS, banks, POS agents, and fintech wallets had already done much of that work. So MoMo was entering a market where money movement was commoditised, so what was its edge going to be?

It was certainly not the price. MoMo’s flat ₦10 transfer fee was only competitive for amounts above ₦5,000, meaning it was not enough to change behaviour in a market where many everyday payments were small, frequent, and already moving through bank apps, POS agents, OPay and PalmPay.

A payments product needs a wedge. It must make money movement radically easier, be accepted in more places, be trusted more than alternatives, be cheaper or more reliable, give users a second product they badly want, or own a high-frequency habit before asking people to change financial behaviour.

MTN employs a lot of smart people who understand the constraints. In 2023, Eli Hini, then MoMo PSB CEO, explained the fintech’s strategy as using MTN’s “wide distribution network” and the mobile phone as the key channel, whether a basic feature phone or smartphone. In another interview, he suggested that the idea was to take money from under people’s pillows and beds and bring it into the financial ecosystem, a.k.a financial inclusion.

Compare that to what the fintechs it was supposed to dominate were doing.

OPay and PalmPay focused on being physically present when banks failed and ATMs ran out of cash. During the 2023 cash crunch, Semafor reported that vendors and customers turned to OPay and PalmPay because traditional banks could not handle the surge in online transactions. By March 24, 2023, both apps were ranked first and second among Nigeria’s most downloaded finance apps on Google Play.

In hindsight, there was still a huge cash-to-digital opportunity in Nigeria, but the fight was about who could make a market woman, student, dispatch rider, and salary earner trust that the wallet/product would work right now.

OPay answered that question with free transfers, ridiculous subsidies, agents, aggressive customer support, a consumer app that felt lighter than most bank apps, and the good fortune of a cash crunch that made everyone reconsider their banking habits. PalmPay was bundled on Transsion phones even before you made a payment choice.

Moniepoint focused on merchants and in-person payments, then expanded from the business owner to the customer. It now claims to process more than 800 million transactions monthly, with over $17 billion in monthly value, and that two out of three adults in Nigeria make payments through a Moniepoint terminal.

MoMo’s MTN Problem

A telco is excellent at reach, billing, SIM registration, airtime, USSD, and regulatory negotiation. But consumer finance is not only reach; it is product obsession, fraud control, merchant acceptance, customer service, pricing discipline, incentives, dispute resolution, and thousands of tiny moments where users decide whether to keep trusting you.

Then there is the Payment Service Bank licence that can accept deposits, hold wallets, provide payments, issue cards, run agents, and offer remittances. But it cannot lend or accept foreign currency deposits.

That matters because payments alone is a marginal business. Payments will attract users, but credit, merchant tools, working capital, savings yield, and commerce deepen the relationship.

A wallet that only moves money is useful, but in Nigeria, money already moves, so your wallet must either be more reliable than the banks, more present than cash, more rewarding than alternatives, or attached to another product people urgently want.

Again, MTN has smart people, and they also know this. Its executives talked about financial education, mobile device financing, SME exposure, online payments, remittances, and collaboration with banks and fintechs.

“Agents determine the fees they want to charge, so fees are not constant or controlled. That also doesn’t help customer adoption.” - Eli Hini (2023)

Again, what is MoMo’s sharp wedge? If it’s rural inclusion, why does it look like many PSBs are focusing on cities and competing for already-banked customers?

If it is agents, then why has the agent network shrunk dramatically?

If it were merchants, why have OPay, PalmPay, Moniepoint, and the banks become the names people associate with everyday payments?

MoMo had 3.5 million active wallets by Q1 2023, according to Hini. By the end of 2023, TechCabal reported that active wallets had risen to 5.3 million, supported by an agent network that had grown from 103,000 to 327,000 and a merchant ecosystem that had reached 324,000 merchants. By 2024, those numbers declined.

MTN’s interpretation was that it was improving the quality of the ecosystem, and that is possible. Not all wallets are equal, and not all agents are useful; some customers exist only because of incentives, and some agents transact only because commissions exist, so cleaning that up can make the business healthier.

But when a fintech business loses that much surface area in a market where competitors are becoming more visible, they have to prove that what remains is a smaller, better machine.

We can’t talk about MoMo without that security incident that cost the company roughly ₦10 billion. Hini called it a technical glitch, said no customers lost money, and that MoMo had reviewed protocols and improved controls around integrations and partnerships. For a payments business trying to build trust in its first year, a major loss involving integrations impacts product confidence.

MoMo came with a distribution thesis into a market where distribution had already become a knife fight. It expected its reach to do more of the work than it could with a constrained licence in a market where the most valuable fintech loops required either lending, merchant economics, stronger consumer incentives, or brutal last-mile execution. It launched into a Nigeria where instant payments were already massive, bank transfers were already normal, and the remaining prize was not “teach Nigerians that digital money exists.” The prize was “be the financial product they trust when cash fails, banks break, and every failed transfer has immediate consequences.”

OPay and PalmPay met that moment from the consumer side. Moniepoint met it from the merchant side. The banks, for all their failures, still held salaries, corporate accounts, cards, credit relationships, and decades of customer inertia. MoMo had MTN’s brand and distribution, but it was never really clear why a Nigerian who already had a bank app, OPay, PalmPay, a POS agent nearby, and a Moniepoint terminal in front of them needed MoMo as their primary wallet.

Anyway, as it stands, MTN Nigeria has a telecom business to protect, especially after a brutal 2024 and a much better 2025. Moving MoMo and Y’ello Digital into a better-capitalised HoldCo could reduce pressure on MTN Nigeria’s books, bring fintech expertise closer to the asset, and create room for partnerships or future regulatory changes. MTN Group has the broader fintech ambition, the continental playbook, and more reasons to keep funding the experiment.

Yet a separate MoMo still has to answer the same old question. What does it do that Nigerians do not already get from OPay, PalmPay, Moniepoint, their bank, or the POS agent beside their street?

P:S: Will OPay IPO before the Butterfly Fintech? We’ll talk about it only on Sunday.

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How to fight disruption

Our people say that when a man wakes up is his own morning, so good morning to me.

Sometime this week, my lawyer friend mentioned that he was representing someone at an Advertising Tribunal and was trying to perfect bail of ₦2 million for her. His client’s offence was advertising on Instagram without getting approval from the Advertising Regulatory Council of Nigeria (ARCON).

I’d seen a few advertising professionals rage against ARCON’s overreach in the past, but it always existed in the back of my consciousness; this week, I could not get over the absurdity of anyone needing to arrange bail of N2 million for posting ads on Instagram. The last time I checked, some of those ads cost something like $5 a day.

As it happens, my friend’s client is not an edge case. In early 2024, the Advertisers Association of Nigeria told PUNCH that roughly fifty of its member companies had been dragged before the Advertising Tribunal, with bench warrants issued for managing directors of firms that refused to appear.

Captain Ado Sanusi, the MD of Aero Contractors, was hit with a twenty-two-count criminal charge for tweets that said things like “Fly with us to Sokoto” and “The journey of a lifetime.”

If you take even five minutes to research this, you’ll find that this is one of the most ridiculous examples of a regulator refusing to get disrupted as the shape and form of advertising changed under its feet. You’ll also find an agency that got itself legislated from the brink of disruption.

To advertise lawfully on social media in Nigeria today, you must file a paper application addressed to the Director-General of ARCON, signed by a registered advertising practitioner. Your application must include the ad itself, a completed Standards Panel Form 001, and a payment receipt of N20,000 per concept.

Approval timelines are not built for real-time digital advertising, with ARCON’s guidelines showing that its approval Panel meets monthly, with accelerated vetting available.

You can pay N70,000 for a sixteen-hour turnaround for ten concepts, while N100,000 gets you an eight-hour turnaround for fifteen concepts.

If you used a foreign model or shot the ad abroad, there is a deterrent fee of N3 million. If you skip any of this and run the ad anyway, the regularisation fee is N1 million per infraction, demanded within seven days, rising to N3 million if you run three posts without approval.

Let’s back up a bit. For most of Nigeria’s history, if you wanted to put an ad in front of a Nigerian, you needed airtime, which was controlled by a handful of broadcasters, newspapers, and outdoor firms. You also needed a creative asset, which meant a production company doing a video or print for a billboard. Then you needed placement, a.k.a somebody who knew which slot on which station at what hour reached which audience at what rate. All of this complexity was handled by an advertising agency/media buyer.

The Advertising Practitioners Council of Nigeria (APCON), which was ARCON’s predecessor, sat on top of this structure and regulated the practitioners who worked within it. Everyone in the value chain, like copywriters, media buyers, and account managers, had to be registered.

But once we could pay for things online reliably, online advertising was within reach of anyone with a debit card and internet access. It was the beginning of the end of the monopoly broadcasters had on exposure.

Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and the rest of the Meta stack also broke the placement monopoly, because you no longer needed a media buyer to decide who to show your ad to. Their algorithms did the targeting better than any human planner could ever dream of.

YouTube made a phone sufficient for video, and TikTok went further with ads that did not look like ads, made by creators, outperforming anything some production houses could create. Influencer marketing severed the final cord, and by the early 2020s, an ad could be a human being posting on their own feed about a product they had been paid to use, with no agency, production company, or registered practitioner in the value chain.

Each wave of disruption took away a function that the advertising regulator used to perform, and by 2022, a hairdresser in Surulere could reach hundreds of thousands of Nigerians without even knowing who a registered practitioner was.

The only cost was whatever Instagram/Facebook or Google charged, and then later in 2022, 7.5% VAT. A growing share of advertising could now happen outside the professional chain that APCON was built to regulate.

When you’re getting disrupted like this, you cannot put your head in the sand; your bottom line will let you know that there’s fire on the mountain, and you will fight like hell against it. In 2014, APCON began issuing violation notices and fines to the people who advertised without paying the stipulated fees.

The funeral home MIC Royal Limited was fined N500,000 for placing an ad in the PUNCH newspaper without going through an APCON-registered practitioner. The Registered Trustees of the International Covenant Ministerial Council got a similar fine, but both entities refused to pay and instead went to court.

As the courts interpreted it, the old APCON law was built around advertising practitioners, not advertising itself; ergo, if you were not a registered practitioner, APCON had no authority over you; my hairdresser in Surulere could go on with her ads.

At this point, the regulator had a choice. It could accept that the economy had moved somewhere its statute was not designed to follow, and build a new model, or even pivot to post-publication review like the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority.

But this is Nigeria, so the National Assembly enacted a new Act that guaranteed the survival of the advertising regulator.

In 2022, the APCON Act was repealed, and in its place came the ARCON Act, which included a provision (Section 54) that any person who places an ad targeting the Nigerian market without the prior approval of the Advertising Standards Panel commits a criminal offence.

So we went from an act that regulated advertising professionals to an act that targeted everyone who advertised to Nigerians; my Surulere hairdresser in Surulere was suddenly in danger.

Armed with Section 54, ARCON was emboldened. In a January 2024 PUNCH interview, Advertisers Association of Nigeria (ADVAN) president Osamede Uwubanmwen connected ARCON’s aggression to the Federal Government removing the regulator from national budgetary allocation. ARCON was tilting towards “an aggressive taxing regime” that was stifling the industry and “If we are not careful, we will be told to vet obituaries,” Uwubanmwen added.

Some people will argue there is a case for ARCON vetting ads, seeing as Nigerians got defrauded by Ponzi schemes, which did a fair bit of advertising. Meta’s moderation does almost nothing at the Nigerian end.

Yet, the argument for regulation ignores the fact that regulations exist. The Cybercrimes Act of 2024 makes it a crime to publish misleading content online, and the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission already polices deceptive commercial practices.

If you pay the fine, you have still not been approved, so you have to vet the ad afterward anyway. If you cannot pay the fine and refuse to appear before the Advertising Offences Tribunal, there will be a bench warrant out for you.

This is how my friend’s client, an honest-to-God business owner, ended up on bail of N2 million with two sureties in like sum.

The Tribunal charging her is a body whose members are appointed on ARCON’s recommendation to the Minister of Information.

Did I mention that Section 45 of the Act lets the Tribunal Chairman issue a warrant for the police to enter business premises by force?

My friend’s client will make her bail. She will probably fight the charge, or pay the fine, or both, because that is what people who run small businesses in Nigeria do when the state puts its hand on them.

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A few thoughts on methods

In 2021, I wrote a newsletter arguing that Nigerian journalism needed a reckoning over methods. The impetus for that argument was “Cornflakes for Jihad,” a viral article by a journalist at the height of his fame. Several smart editors told me not to publish. I did anyway, because it’s always worth putting methodological disagreements on the record. I have been thinking about those methods again with another publication that’s now at the height of its powers.

GST, the youth-focused political media platform, has built something many Nigerian political media have struggled with: a real sense of urgency among young people. Communiqué’s recent profile describes it as a media platform and a vehicle for real-time civic participation. It is social-first and organised around a logic of story, campaign, pressure, and response. Its founder, Adewunmi Emoruwa, has said openly that GST rejected the principle of strict neutrality from the start. “We are going to editorialise from the beginning,” he told Communiqué. “We’re going to give people the truth.”

That should interest anyone who cares about the media, because Nigerian journalism has spent years trying to get young people interested in politics. The industry has tried explainers, breaking news, video, simplification, Instagram packaging — all the usual tricks for making politics feel accessible. A few of those digital publications have become real cultural touchpoints.

GST has found that what really moves people is not format but stance. It is succeeding because it offers some young audiences explanation and alignment; it’s a publication that shares their anger and tells them what to do with it.

Nigerian media has a credibility problem with young audiences, with legacy outlets widely perceived as deferential to power and reluctant to hold the line when it matters. In that environment, a publication that is openly adversarial toward government is filling a vacuum that traditional journalism created by failing to be adversarial enough.

People do not want GST to be neutral because they do not believe neutrality, as practised by Nigerian newsrooms, has produced accountability. They want someone who will say the thing and stay on it until something moves. You can compare this to Fox News in the US, although the analogy is imperfect because Nigeria does not have a left-right ideological axis in the American sense, so GST is not anchoring one end of a partisan divide. It is closer to a mood: the widespread sense among younger Nigerians that the political class is extractive and unaccountable, and that the media has been more interested in access than in pressure.

There is also a structural argument in GST’s favour. Traditional accountability journalism in Nigeria has historically stopped at revelation. An investigation gets published, it trends for a day, and for the public, nothing happens, and everyone moves on.

The distance between “informed” and “activated” is itself a democratic failure, and GST’s model — story, campaign, pressure, response — is an attempt to close that gap. If the point of journalism is to serve the public interest, and if the public interest requires not just information but consequence, then you can argue that GST is doing what the rest of the industry has been too polite to do.

Yet, it’s worth asking, what does this kind of stance do to the reporting?

Once a publication is organised to generate pressure, it is incentivised not just to find out what is true but to identify the version of the truth most useful for mobilisation. Facts that sharpen the case move to the front, and nuance gets shunted to the side. What discipline can one hope for once a newsroom begins with its conclusion?

Consider GST’s coverage of the tax reform bills. The underlying grievance against the tax reforms was real and widely shared. Nigeria’s public services are poor, and the trust deficit between citizens and the state is enormous; it has created the feeling that taxation without adequate public infrastructure is extractive. There is a legitimate debate to be had about whether this government has earned the right to ask for more.

Yet, in GTS’s video on the tax bill, the platform told its audience: “There are no tax reforms here that benefit you. None.” It described the reforms as “theft.” It asked whether taxes have ever helped Nigerians and answered its own question: “Not in a million years.”

What the video didn’t do at any point was engage with what the reforms actually contained. The bills raised the income tax exemption threshold to ₦800,000 for low-income earners. The bill reduced Company Income Tax from 30% to 25%. They exempted small businesses with a turnover under ₦50 million. You can argue these provisions are insufficient, or that the government cannot be trusted to implement them honestly. Those are fair arguments and worth making, but their tax videos did not make them. It simply declared the entire enterprise a fraud and moved on.

When you have a viewpoint, supporting facts are amplified. Facts that complicate it are pushed aside.

Every reporter who has done serious work knows this process: you begin with a hunch, then you make calls, read documents, speak to more people. At some point, the story shifts. Sometimes it softens, and other times it turns against your original instinct. Sometimes you find that your first take was too neat. That is the journalistic method.

Facts do not always arrange themselves into clean narratives unless someone leaves some of them out. A government policy might be badly designed, but also solve a real problem. An official might be corrupt and also be right about the thing they are being attacked for. The discipline of reporting is the willingness to hold both possibilities open until the evidence closes one of them.

Serious policy stories require the journalist to go and find the people who actually understand the subject and let those people complicate the picture. The expert who says “it’s not that simple” is not being unhelpful; they are giving you the story.

Ultimately, the thing to think about is that once an audience understands that a publication has a position on editorial identity, they begin to discount it.

The reporting might be accurate, and the facts might be right, but the reader knows that the facts were selected to build a case, and so they feel a pull to go and hear the other side before forming a view.

Fox covers real stories and breaks real news, but you don’t watch Fox believing that you’re getting the complete picture. You watch Fox to get the Fox version, and then you might even check CNN to get another frame.

This kind of journalism eventually loses its authority to settle questions. A platform built to mobilise might consider this an acceptable trade-off — you do not need to be the definitive account if you can be the most energising one. But the publication trains its own audience to treat it as a source of perspective rather than a source of fact, and once that expectation sets in, it is very difficult to reverse.

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Airtime Lending is Easy

MTN Nigeria suspended Xtratime early this week; today, Airtel followed. Tens of millions of Nigerians who borrow airtime and data daily — through a system where repayment simply comes out of your next recharge — woke up to find the lending machine switched off.

My first instinct was fraud. When an easy “Lending Is Easy” business suddenly stops working, the first guess is usually that some bad actor has managed to jam it. One Value Added Service (VAS) operator told Notadeepdive it can advance up to ₦400 million a day, and in H1 2025, MTN Nigeria’s fintech revenue had reached ₦83.2 billion, with the company saying the growth was majorly driven by airtime lending and advanced services.

The truth, it turns out, is that the suspensions are not about fraud. They are about what happens when a regulator sets out to fix one problem and ends up redesigning it.

The Rules

Nigeria's digital lenders have needed regulation for a while. The loan apps that multiplied over the past few years brought with them harassment, contact scraping, and public shaming as a collections strategy. The Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission responded in 2025 with a broad set of rules for Digital, Electronic, Online, or Non-Traditional (DEON) Consumer Lending. The case for that intervention was strong.

The VAS end of the market had its own problems. Forceful subscriptions, auto-renewals, opaque billing; the space has a long history of sharp practices that made consumer protection a real regulatory issue. Nobody can argue that the sector deserved to be left alone.

But what the FCCPC actually produced went further than consumer protection. The DEON regulations pulled airtime and data lending into scope and then imposed a set of requirements that have nothing obvious to do with protecting borrowers. Lenders providing airtime or data credit must work with at least two intermediaries. At least one of those intermediaries must be fully Nigerian-owned. Exclusive arrangements are restricted. Agreements between lenders and service providers and even modifications to those agreements must be filed with the FCCPC for approval.

If your problem is borrowers being harassed, shamed, and overcharged, those are unusual places to linger. Harassment, opacity, data abuse, and predatory collections are one category of problem. Ownership structure, intermediary count, exclusivity, and commercial agreement approvals are a different category entirely.

Since the rules were introduced in July 2025, most of the VAS players began pushing back discreetly, two people with direct knowledge of the matter told me. The compliance deadline was set for January 2026, and for a while, the industry seemed to have treated this as the sort of Nigerian rule that makes noise and then gets worked around.

It did not get worked around. By April, the FCCPC had demanded written assurances of compliance, set an April 16 deadline, and threatened sanctions against operators who did not fall in line. That is the escalation that forced everything into the open.

On April 14, two days before the deadline, the Wireless Application Service Providers Association of Nigeria filed suit at the Federal High Court in Lagos, arguing that the FCCPC had crossed from consumer protection into telecom regulation — territory that belongs to the Nigerian Communications Commission under the Nigerian Communications Act. Justice Lewis-Allagoa has not ruled on the substance but granted an interim order restraining the FCCPC from enforcing key provisions pending a hearing on April 27.

MTN and Airtel appear to have suspended their airtime lending services, not because the court told them to, but because the regulatory ground underneath them had become too unstable to keep operating on. When your regulator is demanding compliance with rules that a court has just frozen, the safest move is to stop moving.

The result is that a set of rules introduced to protect consumers has, for now, removed a service that tens of millions of consumers actually use. The FCCPC wanted to clean up digital lending. What it got, at least this week, is a market that has stopped lending entirely.

There are many ways to regulate bad lenders. You can stop them from harassing borrowers. You can make pricing transparent. You can punish abusive recovery tactics. You can require licensing and reporting.

What is less intuitive is telling airtime lenders how many intermediaries they must use, what nationality those intermediaries must be, and then requiring regulatory approval for every commercial arrangement in the chain. That is less consumer protection and more market design.

In a business built on captive customers and massive daily volumes, the commercial question is not really who lends but who gets to stand in the middle. The FCCPC’s rules regulate lending and restructure who is permitted to intermediate it, and on what terms.

A cynical person might look at all this and think that Nigeria has never met a healthy pool of cash without immediately wondering how to insert a middleman into it. Scale can wait. Global ambition can wait. Building the best company can wait. First, let us decide who gets to stand in the middle and collect.

The official case for the rule is consumer protection. The public explanation for why consumer protection requires a wholly local intermediary is unclear.

I am not a cynical person. So I am perfectly willing to believe that the FCCPC’s interest in deciding who gets to stand inside one of telecoms’ juiciest business lines is just a coincidence.

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Customer accepted higher tariffs, telcos now need to suck it up

Typically, when your network is bad in Nigeria, you can swear at your telecom provider, type an angry complaint on social media using the same bad network, and well…move on with your life. Starting this month, the Nigerian Communications Commission says the networks should feel some of that pain too. Under a new framework, subscribers in areas affected by poor service will receive automatic airtime credits. The operator will identify the affected local government area, match it against subscribers who actually generated billed usage there, and issue credits to affected users.

A heavy data user with a miserable connection should therefore get more than a light caller, because the credit is tied to usage and spending patterns. The cost to the operator rises with the revenue it is earning from the people and places it is underserving.

Earlier this year, TechCabal reported that the regulator was moving to impose about ₦12.4 billion in penalties across the industry for breaches of service standards. That sounds severe until you compare it to the scale of the business. MTN Nigeria alone reported ₦5.2 trillion in service revenue and ₦1.1 trillion in profit after tax.

Nigeria has tried compensation before. In 2008, Ernest Ndukwe’s NCC ordered MTN and Celtel to compensate subscribers for persistent poor quality. The operators resisted the whole thing, went to court and lost. MTN later moved to refund about ₦2.7 billion in airtime, and Celtel rolled out a phased compensation plan.

Today, the operators’ best defence is that the new compensation framework attacks the symptom, not the cause. They will point to fibre cuts, diesel costs, vandalism, and the ugly economics of rolling out infrastructure outside the richest corridors. Some of that is true.

But customers also accepted higher tariff prices, and the largest operator is back to profitability. The harder it becomes to argue poverty, the easier it becomes for the regulator to argue that bad service should cost money.

More Lending Is Easy

In June 2023, the Tinubu administration and the CBN got sick of kicking the can down the road and decided to let currency prices be decided by the market. If policymakers took forever to get to a common-sense decision, Nigeria’s big banks had been around long enough to position themselves to profit from a currency repricing.

By December 2024, Zenith held ₦281 billion in derivative assets — the unrealised gains on those positions — against ₦9 billion in derivative liabilities. 2024 rewarded banks for surviving a huge currency repricing.

A year later, those gains went the other way and derivative assets were ₦8 billion vs derivative liabilities of ₦196 billion. Everyone had to go back to the less glamorous business of being Nigerian banks, which, as I pointed out two weeks ago, is less about lending and more about smart capital allocation.

Consumer lending was ₦180.6 billion, down from ₦336.5 billion the year before. It is even smaller than GTCO’s retail lending bucket, which was ₦249.2 billion in 2025. If there’s a retail lending party, Zenith Bank is happy to stay at home. Instead, it piled money into treasury bills, pretty much risk-free and called it a day.

Bonus: Zenith wrote off ₦1.24 trillion of loans in 2025 and framed it as a “bold and prudent clean up.” The reality was more like it was a forced clean-up after the CBN stopped letting banks avoid full provisioning on some stressed foreign-currency loans. It was decided that banks under the forbearance regime could not pay dividends, bonuses to directors and senior management, or invest in foreign subsidiaries until their capital and provisioning positions were fixed.

That said, Zenith remains a deposit-mobilising monster with total deposits reaching ₦24.33 trillion. It has 30 million cardholders and 456 branches.

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We Need to Talk About Marketing

Marketing professionals, like practitioners of every art form, find themselves in a dilemma. Their artistic expression exists to craft a narrative for an audience and sell a brand. But they also have to wield that same expertise to impress their fellow marketing colleagues, and potential future employers and clients.

There’s the problem.

What marketers, customers, regulators, competition, and industry colleagues call good marketing copy could be completely different things. And with every art form, what passes as good is “subjective” and contextual.

Left: An Insurance Company trying to be trendy, Right: A furniture company

I am writing this while having a KitKat, and I am sure it’s largely prompted by KitKat’s announcement that 12 tons of KitKat had been stolen. That’s marketing. It made me buy chocolate I wasn’t thinking about.

Over the last few weeks, I have observed what I can only term good marketing, unsportsmanlike marketing, and straight-up lies dressed as copy. And every time I forward these to my marketing friends, they only celebrate the smart copy — without context.

When a company buys up ad space at the location of a competitor’s event in a bid to convert eyeballs they did not acquire, it is reminiscent of famed campaigns such as Tesco vs ASDA vs Sainsbury’s, Mac vs PC, Samsung vs iPhone, Mercedes vs BMW, FedEx vs UPS, and Nike’s famous stealing of the World Cup and Olympics campaigns.

These are crafty; they show maturity, and any form of counter-response is valid. Marketing folks should be applauded for their inventiveness here.

But it seems to me that participants of the growing Nigerian ecosystem do not understand that industries are different and operate with different rules.

Industries like B2B SaaS, e-commerce, crypto, consumer hardware, and apparel companies have historically had marketers stretch the truth and be celebrated for it.

There is a reason Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Steve Jobs were celebrated for selling products that didn’t exist yet (even if they did eventually deliver), but Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos, SBF at FTX, and CZ at Binance went to prison for what looked like lesser offences on the face of it.

The difference isn’t the size of the lie, but the industry. Norms, rules, and regulations differ. Tech audiences will tolerate aspirational selling. Financial services audiences, customers, regulators, and the courts do not.

When money is involved, the person being lied to is a disappointed early adopter who trusted you with their savings and livelihood. Therefore, the potential for harm is fundamentally different.

Financial services, just like healthcare, have second-order effects beyond us, the players.

In November 2025, the Central Bank issued a circular directing all financial institutions to immediately withdraw non-compliant advertisements. All ads must now be factual, balanced, and transparent.

Exaggerating product benefits — banned. Omitting material information — banned. Comparative or superlative claims — banned. Starting January 2026, the CBN said it would review and impose sanctions for breaches.

So companies should not be notorious for sleights of hand with their marketing, no matter how glossy or impressive it would look to fellow marketing colleagues.

They are doing impressive things already. There is room to sell the truth about what is being built without exaggerating. Especially as we are entering the second decade of life for some of the leading companies in Nigeria’s financial services ecosystem.

So yes, it has to be repeated. Being ambiguous about a microfinance bank licence by pulling a “banking licence” pump fake is not marketing. It’s a lie.

The local and international media that ran with this narrative, rather than challenge claims of “full-scale financial services,” to compete with Access Bank and Zenith Bank, should have done better.

It’s a microfinance bank licence. It’s a good move — they can now hold deposits, retain more in the settlement value chain, and build lending products off open banking data.

They processed $40 billion in a decade. They joined the CBN’s Virtual Assets AML pilot.- These were strong stories on their own. You don’t need to embellish any of that. Tell that story.

But calling a microfinance bank licence “a banking license” - intentionally omitting that qualifier, while operating in a regulated space that should inspire trust. How should I then trust you with my deposits?

I get that founders have to be delusionally optimistic. I get the Jedi mind tricks on your org and the public to inspire belief. But there has to be a line between founder optimism and customer deception.

And it’s not just the licence framing. Marketing statements across other large players in the industry, like “we are the biggest agent network in Nigeria.” Or “the most licensed institution in Africa.” Or “we process 87% of NIBSS volumes.” These are lies.

And the risk is that regulators, journalists, informed consumers, or even your competition could call you out, causing harm to your brand and the space you operate in.

The Nigerian fintech ecosystem has done remarkable things over the last decade. We don’t need to lie about what we are doing. Rather, we need to get better at telling the truth about it in a compelling, confident manner.

Because if the question becomes “should I trust you with my deposits?” — your marketing copy better be the same as your regulatory filings.

I get it, everyone is trying to pander to investors these days. But does it have to come at the expense of writing marketing checks your organisation cannot cash, nor the regulatory and reputational risk that comes with it?

We don’t need sleight of hand. The truth is already impressive. Tell that one.

Every time you like the newsletter, it increases the chance that more people will find it! See you Sunday.

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Make Microfinance Banks Great Again

Nigeria has over 800 insured microfinance banks, which, if it needs pointing out, is a lot of MFBs.

So “Company X gets a microfinance bank licence” is usually the sort of story that matters a lot to Company X and not very much to the rest of us. Fintechs acquire these licences, founders own them, and sometimes people even hawk said licences on LinkedIn (I’m not making this up!).

A microfinance bank licence is only a story people care about if the company is big enough to make it one.

Flutterwave announced this week that it had secured a Nigerian microfinance banking licence that lets it hold funds and deposits directly and improve settlement efficiency in Nigeria. TechCabal added that the licence came through Flutterwave’s January acquisition of Mono.

So there are two angles to the story. One is that Flutterwave has unlocked an important new capability. The other is that Flutterwave bought a company with a useful licence, upgraded the licence, and announced the result as a crucial milestone.

Why is a microfinance bank licence so special? A lot of the reports on the licence already share this, so let’s not dwell on those.

“In ten years, I see that Flutterwave will be either the JP Morgan of Africa or acquired by one, frankly,” - Olugbenga Agboola

JP Morgan has a balance sheet north of $4 trillion, a 227-year head start, and no microfinance banks. Flutterwave just got one.

So let’s ditch comparisons and see what the sequence for a big private fintech roughly looks like:

1. Build a valuable payments company in a market everyone agrees is promising and complicated.

2. Spend years explaining why the complication is manageable and having like thirty extra slides explaining your business

3. Get close enough to public markets that complexity starts sounding less like ingenuity and more like friction.

4. Add adjacent recognisable elements that broaden the story: bank licences, FX and multicurrency products, stablecoins...

5. Announce those boring things as strategic progress.

Flutterwave has been running this playbook at pace. FX inside Send App through Swap, stablecoins, and a claim that it is engineering “Africa’s largest stablecoin infrastructure.” The Mono acquisition in January was presented as an infrastructure/open banking play with better margins. Bloomberg said at the time that the deal would strengthen earnings and the IPO case. And now a microfinance banking licence is framed as cutting out third parties and keeping the fees.

None of these announcements, by itself, changes what Flutterwave is. But together, they’re building an answer to the only question that matters before an IPO: what kind of company is this?

In April 2024, Agboola discussed hiring executives who could translate tech-speak for regulators. In 2025, the company began emphasising profitability, sustainability, and maturity. The JP Morgan reference does not mean branch banking. It means belonging to the financial establishment.

A company investors admired for navigating complexity now wants to be rewarded for reducing it. That is a reasonable transition every late-stage private company attempts right before it asks the public markets to price it.

The question Flutterwave has not yet answered, the one people ask in closed quarters, group chats, and private channels, is not whether the narrative is coherent. The question is when the narrative produces the event.

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Lending Is Easy. Treasury Bills Are Easier.

One of the recurring ideas I share in Notadeepdive is that lending is easy. You get some funding. Customer deposits, VC money, a DFI facility, whatever is available. You build a credit model, talk about AI in your TechCabal interview, and aim at the gap in your pitch deck: the millions of retail borrowers big banks ignore.

Getting people to repay is where things get complicated. There is no shortage of Nigerian lending startups that raised money, built products, and genuinely believed in their higher calling of serving borrowers the banks wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole.

When things go sideways, the founders will tell you the credit models didn’t work, or the macros turned, or collections were harder than expected. All true.

And it’ll lead us right back to why big banks, with their huge balance sheets and cheap deposits, aren’t more interested in lending in the first place. Every year, we have different answers.

GTCO’s FY2025 financial statements show a loan book of ₦3.13 trillion. 85% of those loans went to corporates. Borrowing to starving writers and overworked accountants, a.k.a retail banking, was ₦249 billion. There are fintechs with bigger retail loan books.

Lending to Nigeria’s army of Small and Medium Enterprises was ₦31 billion.

If GTCO isn’t deploying its ₦12.55 trillion in customer deposits into lending, what is it doing with them?

Buying government securities. Treasury bills, FGN bonds, eurobonds, commercial paper — ₦5.54 trillion worth, a portfolio 77% larger than its entire loan book.

For every four naira a customer deposits at GTBank, the bank lends roughly one naira to another customer. The other three naira go into government securities.

GTCO is the most extreme version of this in the Nigerian banking sector. The bank’s loan-to-deposit ratio is 25% despite the CBN’s directive of 65%. Other tier-one banks run higher, though most are still well below the target. In other emerging markets like Brazil, India, and Egypt, a 25% LDR at a top-tier institution would raise eyebrows.

The incentives and market structure show how commonsensical GTCO’s moves are.

A Nigerian Treasury bill maturing in six months yields 20-22% with no credit risk. You buy the T-bill, it pays you on schedule, and you go home.

A corporate loan yields maybe 25-28%. For that extra 3-6%, you take on credit risk. GTCO’s loan impairment charges in 2025 were ₦66 billion. The securities book had impairment charges of ₦114 million. Not billion. Million.

GTCO’s loan book earned ₦559 billion gross, roughly ₦493 billion net of impairments. The securities book earned ₦807 billion gross, roughly ₦807 billion net.

To match what the treasury desk produces from government paper, GTCO would need to add another ₦3 trillion in credit, hire the people to underwrite it, set aside the capital, absorb the defaults. Or it could just buy more treasury bills.

GTCO’s deposit base costs almost nothing to maintain. Retail savings accounts (₦2.99 trillion in deposits) pay low single-digit interest. Corporate current accounts (₦5.57 trillion in deposits) often pay nothing at all. A bank getting deposits at 2-4% and buying T-bills at 22% does not need clever financial engineering.

Banks are not failing to lend because they are timid or incompetent. They are making rational capital allocation decisions and the highest risk-adjusted return available to a Nigerian bank with a large deposit franchise is not consumer credit or SME lending. It is government securities.

There is a version of this argument that is a moral case against GTCO and banks like it. Nigeria needs credit, and banks are hoarding deposits in government paper, starving the private sector of capital.

The banks will respond by asking, “ Who should we lend to?

With 85% of the loan book in corporates, the bank is already lending to the creditworthy part of the economy. When it lends to retail customers and SMEs, the impairment experience is materially worse; retail loan impairments relative to the retail book are significantly higher than corporate impairments relative to the corporate book.

There may not be enough creditworthy private-sector demand to absorb what banks are putting into securities. A T-bill yield of 22% is the government competing for the same pool of capital. At those rates, any private borrower needs to generate returns well above 22% after accounting for risk, and the number of Nigerian businesses that can credibly do that is smaller than anyone would like to admit.

GTCO’s E-business income — revenue from digital transactions, electronic payments, and internet banking — grew 14% to ₦64.7 billion. The bank earned more from digital channels than from lending to retail and SME customers combined.

A final thought.

The 2025 Tax Act introduced withholding tax on short-term investment securities aimed squarely at the income source banks like GTCO rely on most. GTCO’s effective tax rate went from 19.6% to 29.7%.

The bank’s tax bill jumped from ₦248 billion to ₦365 billion and while Profit Before Tax barely moved (₦1.23 trillion), Profit After Tax fell from ₦1.02 trillion to ₦866 billion. The entire decline in profit is tax.

If banks are going to use customer deposits to earn 22% on government paper instead of lending, the government will tax the spread. Whether it actually shifts behaviour is unclear because the pre-tax return on securities still beats the risk-adjusted return on lending.

GTCO declared a final dividend of ₦11.76 per share, bringing the full year to ₦12.76, a 59% increase from 2024 and a four-fold increase in shareholder payouts in three years.

Say what you will, but GTCO’s shareholders will have no complaints.

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Lending is not the footnote

When Moniepoint announced its acquisition of restaurant software startup Orda, the number that travelled fastest was this: Nigerians spend about ₦8 billion a day at restaurants on Moniepoint’s rails. It is a good number, but it’s probably the wrong way to think about the deal.

Annualise it, and you get roughly ₦2.92 trillion. It sounds enormous until you place it beside the ₦412 trillion Moniepoint says it processed across 14 billion transactions in 2025. On this math, restaurant payments are worth about 0.71% of the total. Will one of Nigeria’s most important fintechs buy a specialist restaurant software company just to make payments flow a little more neatly?

So this probably is not mainly a payments story but a lending story.

Moniepoint says it disbursed over ₦1 trillion in credit to around 70,000 businesses in 2025 (an average of ₦14.3 million per business). If you are lending at that scale, you need visibility into more than just payments. You need to know if those businesses should be taking loans in the first place.

Payment data is very useful. It tells you how much money moves through a business, how often it moves, when sales spike, and whether the merchant looks busy enough to deserve credit. That is why fintech lenders love it.

But payment data also has blind spots. It can tell you that a restaurant is selling a lot of food. It cannot, by itself, tell you whether the restaurant is making money on said food. It does not show ingredient waste or margins collapsing because supplier prices have soared. It does not show that the highest-selling item on the menu is also the least profitable.

I exclusively reported that Moniepoint had taken Shoprite to court over a ₦2.4bn working capital loan in December 2025. Last month, a ₦4.38 billion working capital loan to Alerzo also ended in front of a judge.

Orda is not a generic bookkeeping tool for restaurants. It sits deeper in restaurant operations: point of sale, inventory, ordering channels, websites, business analytics, and restaurant workflow. TechCabal reported that more than 1,075 restaurants relied on Orda in 2024 and that it processed more than 5.2 million transactions that year. The data of those restaurants won’t transform Moniepoint’s scale, but the data inside those restaurants is more revealing than raw payment data.

When Moniepoint’s business management tool Moniebook was in beta in late 2025, a company executive said the tool sends “real-time operational data to the credit team, including transaction counts tied to specific products, inventory turnover rates, margin health, and peak sales hours.”

It felt like the company was telling us what problem it is trying to solve: lending with deeper operational visibility, not just terminal data. Orda solves that.

Orda’s ambition was never modest. In 2022, its CEO said he wanted to build the “Toast of Africa.” It had its eye on becoming an embedded-finance solution disguised as software. The revenue of American restaurant software technology company Toast for 2025 shows why. It booked $6.153 billion in total revenue last year, including $5.037 billion from financial technology solutions and $936 million from subscription services. Restaurant software is important, but the bigger prize is what the software lets you do: process payments, offer financing, and capture more of the merchant’s financial life.

Of course, cynics will point out that SaaS alone is a difficult business when your customers are small restaurants, and your pricing is necessarily low. TechCrunch reported in 2022 that Orda’s pricing ran from about ₦1,000 to ₦20,000 per month, depending on plan.

Even without knowing Orda’s exact current pricing mix, software revenue alone was unlikely to create a venture-scale outcome. The real value sat in the operational data and in the possibility of attaching payments and credit to it. Moniepoint already has the rails, the merchant base, and the lending engine, and Orda has the vertical software. The combination is interesting.

If my reading is right, then the story is that the next stage of fintech lending in Nigeria will be won by the company that sees payments and operations, a.k.a Moniepoint is trying to turn operational data into an underwriting advantage.

Will better visibility produce better loans, or just better explanations after some of them go bad? We’ll find out soon enough.

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TOGETHER WITH CREDIT DIRECT

So you’re a freelancer. The government has noticed.

Creators, consultants, and independents - the new tax laws affect how you earn, how you file, and how much you keep. Also, with the March 31 closer than it feels, this is the conversation you need to be having right now.

Watch the detailed breakdown between our Head of Finance and Strategy, Dr Emeka Ucheaga, and Abiodun Kayode-Alli, Senior Tax Consultant at PwC.

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You have three months to subscribe

Notadeepdive covers Nigerian technology and business for some 5,000 subscribers. Some of you have been kind enough to say this newsletter deserves something like 10,000 instead. I agree.

So I’m setting a hard deadline of June 13, 2026 — three months from today — for Notadeepdive to hit 10k subscribers. If we do not get there, I will shut down the newsletter permanently. No extensions.

I’m kidding. Obviously.

But I bet your first instinct was probably: he’s not serious, that deadline will move, let me keep scrolling.

And if you felt a flash of alarm at the thought of this newsletter shutting down permanently, send me money it might have been followed by my strong-arming you. While the goal is reasonable and the timeline is ambitious, the real problem is that the consequences fall entirely on you, the audience, rather than me, who failed to plan.

If it sounds all too familiar, you’re likely a traumatised Nigerian.

On October 26, 2022, Nigeria’s Central Bank announced that old ₦200, ₦500, and ₦1,000 notes would stop being legal tender on January 31, 2023. Therefore, Nigerians had three months to swap old notes for new ones. The timeline was unrealistic and more than a few reasonable people said so, but the CBN held its ground.

The cash shortage that followed triggered protests across multiple states, severe disruption to daily commerce, and widespread hardship. Ultimately, the Supreme Court ruled the deadline was unconstitutional; old and new notes ended up circulating side by side.

It will go down in history as cruel enforcement, when humanity and common sense could have delivered better results.

Last week, we saw another example that shows Nigeria’s institutions learn nothing from policy execution failures. The Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria had been discussing the elimination of cash payments at airports since at least mid-2025, when its managing director outlined an automation strategy for airport revenue collection.

By September, FAAN had partnered with Paystack to pilot contactless payments at Lagos and Abuja airports. In November 2025, the Accountant General of the Federation issued a timeline for all Ministries, Departments, and Agencies (MDAs) to stop accepting physical cash for government revenue.

Fast forward to February 27, 2026, and FAAN confirmed that the cashless system would be fully enforced across all airports from March 1, meaning the last public push came only days before full enforcement. From that date, every motorist entering an airport would need a prepaid FAAN card, an e-tag, or a bank card to get through the toll gate. No card, no entry. Cash, which is how the overwhelming majority of drivers had paid the ₦500-to-₦1,000 access fee for decades, would no longer be accepted.

You’re welcome to guess how that played out.

In 2020, the deadline to link SIM cards to National Identification Number (NIN) was repeatedly extended for years as the NCC discovered that tens of millions of subscribers hadn’t complied. Bank Verification Number enrollment deadlines drifted from 2014 onward.

In every case, the arc is the same: hard deadline, mass unpreparedness, chaos or extension, then a reversion to a phased approach that should have been used from the start. FAAN’s March 1 enforcement only added another data point to the pattern.

After years of deadlines, reversals, and extensions, government deadlines in Nigeria have lost their power to shock. The rational response for many Nigerians is to treat a government deadline as a negotiating position.

When FAAN set a March 1 deadline, many motorists didn’t prepare because experience told them the date would shift. When it didn’t, the system buckled under the weight of people who had rationally concluded, based on precedent, that the government was bluffing.

By March 4, President Tinubu suspended the policy at a Federal Executive Council meeting, with the aviation minister explaining that the President acted “out of empathy.” A day later, FAAN officials had vacated the toll gates, and vehicles were driving through without paying.

A hybrid system has now gone live with cash and cards accepted, a phased arrangement that should have been done from the start. To be fair, FAAN’s spokesperson said the original plan was a phased rollout, but the AGF’s circular gave agencies 45 days to deploy electronic alternatives. A government-wide rule, designed for hundreds of agencies with wildly different operating realities, was applied without any translation layer or nuance, and of course, we found ourselves where we always find ourselves.

I’ll now be taking new subscribers while continuing to write the newsletter.

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Oh, wait! I worked on this 2025 Impact Report for CcHUB and I’d love for you to read it!

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TOGETHER WITH CREDIT DIRECT

The tax reforms have been passed. How prepared are you? March 31 is the filing deadline for employed individuals. June 30 is the corporate deadline for business owners. Both are closer than they feel right now.

Our Head of Finance and Strategy, Dr. Emeka Ucheaga, sat down with Abiodun Kayode-Alli, Senior Tax Consultant at PwC, for a conversation that cuts through the noise, what the new reforms actually mean, what they change for your business, and what you should be doing before the deadline arrives.

Watch The Full Conversation

Kill bill

The bill to establish a Nigerian Fintech Regulatory Commission is hard to take seriously as policy, but it must now be taken seriously as politics.

When I first wrote about it in November 2025, it was a telecoms-era regulatory thinking dragged into fintech, with not enough editing. The text had fintechs paying for “spectrum” and defined fintech so loosely that a bank with a mobile app could qualify. Most importantly, it proposed planting a brand-new regulator on top of the Central Bank of Nigeria, which already licenses and supervises payment service providers, mobile money operators, switches, gateways, payment banks, and most of the machinery that makes digital payments work.

Despite the bill’s many problems, it has momentum.

On March 2, the House of Representatives held a public hearing across five joint committees. Speaker Abbas Tajudeen opened the session and described the proposed commission as “complementary” to existing regulators. The bill’s sponsor, Hon. Fuad Laguda, was also on hand.

Who wants this and why

One thing that everyone at the public hearing seemed to agree on is the need for regulation. Where opinions diverge is between people who already have a route into the current regulatory order and those who do not.

OPay’s Maxwell Loko warned that a parallel regulator would mean duplicated licensing, higher compliance costs, and investment uncertainty. He recommended a single lead regulator anchored by the CBN, with clearer inter-agency coordination around it.

FairMoney’s Henry Obiekea was more diplomatic but arrived at the same conclusion: dual oversight would mean more procedural friction and room for contradictory instructions.

By and large, the licensed fintechs don’t want this bill.

On the other side of the divide are the Association of Telecommunications, Information Technology, Cable Satellite Network Operators and Allied Services Employers of Nigeria (ATICEN) and the Association of Mobile Money and Bank Agents in Nigeria (AMBAN).

These are the infrastructure layer beneath the apps, and they believe the CBN has built a regulatory architecture that focuses only on a handful of companies, with everyone else shuffling for attention.

Nigeria’s digital finance infrastructure is wider than the list of firms the CBN talks to most often, they argue. These players want recognition and a seat at the table.

Yet, their real grievance has not magically produced a good law.

Section 31 of the bill requires all fintech operators to obtain an NFRC licence even if they already hold licences from the CBN or SEC. On the bill’s logic, the entire industry will become retroactively unlicensed on Day One. One stakeholder at the hearing flagged this and recommended an initial compliance window rather than criminal sanctions.

The bill also gives the commission broad discretion over licence conditions, suspensions, revocations, consumer codes, tariffs, and competition matters, authorities other agencies already exercise. It is one more regulator added to the pile, with enough overlapping powers to guarantee turf wars.

Three days after the House hearing, the Senate went in the opposite direction. Senator Adetokunbo Abiru, chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking, Insurance and Other Financial Institutions, said fintech should be placed explicitly under the CBN’s supervision through an amendment to the Bank and Other Financial Institutions Act (BOFIA). Strengthening BOFIA and modernising the CBN’s existing powers, he argued, would be more effective than creating a standalone agency that duplicates functions and fragments authority.

Senator Abiru’s position is a sensible legislative articulation of the alternative case that the existing framework for regulating needs updating. But the answer is not a version of the NCC for Fintechs.

The CBN appears to be thinking along similar lines. Its February Fintech Policy Insight Report proposed a Standing Fintech Engagement Forum, a Single Regulatory Window for licensing coordination, an expanded sandbox, and a shared compliance utility. You can disagree with the CBN about many things — and many people do — but this is a better plan to improve coordination.

Ultimately, the best argument for the fintech regulatory commission bill is political representation.

If the National Assembly wants to force a conversation about who gets seen in Nigeria’s fintech architecture, that is a useful fight. Agents and infrastructure providers have legitimate grievances about a system that treats them as an afterthought. But if the claim is that a new commission is the best way to regulate a fast-growing sector, it should be laughed back into committee.

This bill has stayed alive because it gives several constituencies something the current system does not: recognition, access, and maybe a future lever of influence. That is often enough to keep a bad bill moving.

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TOGETHER WITH CREDIT DIRECT

The tax reforms have been passed. How prepared are you? March 31 is the filing deadline for employed individuals. June 30 is the corporate deadline for business owners. Both are closer than they feel right now.

Our Head of Finance and Strategy, Dr. Emeka Ucheaga, sat down with Abiodun Kayode-Alli, Senior Tax Consultant at PwC, for a conversation that cuts through the noise, what the new reforms actually mean, what they change for your business, and what you should be doing before the deadline arrives.

Watch The Full Conversation

Canal+ Was Always Going to Kill Showmax

In February 2024, I was in Johannesburg for the launch of Showmax 2.0, a black-tie event that was a masterclass in branding.

The gist of the launch was that MultiChoice was finally ditching its aging in-house tech, after writing off $65 million on a failed technology modernization project, to jump into bed with Comcast’s NBCUniversal.

With Showmax 2.0, the continent was getting a streaming service with Peacock’s world-class tech, a deep library of local content, a pipeline of HBO and Universal content, and the crown jewel that is the English Premier League on mobile for a subscription price that undercut the global streamers. The target was 50 million subscribers and $1 billion in revenue in five years.

“[It is] the beginning of what the company hopes will be a long march into dominating and making a solid business of African video streaming,” I wrote at the time.

That long march has now been truncated. On March 5, 2026, MultiChoice sent that email to customers. “The Showmax Board has taken the decision to discontinue the Showmax service in the near future,” part of that email said.

All said, Showmax 2.0 lasted two years.

The immediate reaction was that streaming doesn’t work in Africa, data costs are too high, and consumers can’t pay. None of that is wrong, and there’s already a good analysis of those factors. But the more interesting story is about two business models that were never going to coexist and about how anyone who understood Canal+ could have predicted this outcome the moment it crossed the 35% ownership threshold in MultiChoice.

Canal+ was always going to kill Showmax.

How MultiChoice arrived at streaming

MultiChoice’s pay-TV business appeared to have peaked in 2023. For the South African business, stage 4 of loadshedding caused considerable churn, even among customers with disposable income. By FY25, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Malawi were experiencing severe power shortages.

Meanwhile, paying Showmax subscribers grew 68% year-on-year in FY22. Showmax Pro (the tier with live sports) doubled its subscriber base in FY23. At various points, Showmax reportedly had more subscribers than Netflix across sub-Saharan Africa.

It was easy to interpret it as part of a global trend of cable and satellite TV losing market share to streaming. MultiChoice’s customers were migrating from dishes to screens, the thesis went, and the question was whether MultiChoice would own that future or be disrupted by it.

MultiChoice had content — 91,470 hours of it in more than 45 languages — a SuperSports rights portfolio spanning the EPL, Champions League, and LaLiga, and was operating in 50 African countries. The feeling was that dominance would be inevitable once it had the right technology.

The Vice: Assumptions vs. Hard Reality

In FY2024, Showmax’s trading losses stood at $141 million on revenue of $55m. In FY2025, losses ballooned to $274 million on revenue of $42m. Showmax was spending more than $6 for every $1 it brought in.

The relaunch alone cost approximately $180 million, including $91 million to customise Peacock’s tech for Africa. It also paid quarterly licensing fees to Comcast. In FY24, NBCU exercised its contractual right to sell its 30% Showmax stake back at a predetermined price of $160 million. Canal+ is now writing down $85 million to dissolve the relationship entirely.

Showmax, which accounted for roughly 2% of group revenue, wiped out nearly half the group’s profitability in FY25.

MultiChoice was now losing on two fronts.

In March 2025, MultiChoice lost 2.8 million linear subscribers. Nigeria, which once drove 44% of Rest of Africa revenue, was hit with FX volatility and inflation. MultiChoice’s Rest of Africa revenues fell 44% in dollar terms with a trading loss of R760 million on a reported basis. The segment that had finally turned profitable in FY23 was back in the red within two years.

So MultiChoice was caught in a vice. The old business was shrinking. The new business was hemorrhaging cash, and the macroeconomic environment was actively destroying both.

Canal+ was never going to keep Showmax

Canal+ is not a standalone streaming platform and has never been one. Understanding this is the key to understanding why the Showmax shutdown wasn’t a reaction to bad results. It was baked into Canal+’s business model from the beginning.

Canal+ launched myCanal in December 2013 as a streaming app for its French subscribers. But the platform was designed as an aggregator with one interface through which subscribers could access Canal+’s own channels and third-party services.

By 2019, Canal+ had bundled Netflix into its French subscription tiers. By 2020, Disney+ was included for Ciné Séries subscribers on launch day. Paramount+ and Max followed. Apple TV+ came in 2023.

Canal+ CEO Maxime Saada has described the company’s relationship with Netflix as “80% partners and maybe 20% competitors.” He credited Netflix with doubling France’s paid television market, growing penetration from 30% to 75%. This is not a company that views Netflix as the enemy.

The Canal+ model is basically to avoid competition with global streamers but aggregate them instead. You’ll take a margin on distribution and layer in your own premium channels and local content on top. All the while, you own the customer relationship.

Showmax’s model was to compete directly with Netflix, Amazon, and Disney+ for subscribers and content. It built a proprietary content pipeline and licensed expensive third-party content from HBO, Warner Bros, and Sony.

These two models are structurally incompatible. You cannot simultaneously compete with Netflix (Showmax) and bundle Netflix (Canal+). You have to pick one.

Canal+ picked its model decades ago, and it has already demonstrated how it deploys this model in Africa.

In Francophone Africa, where Canal+ has operated for more than 30 years across 19 countries, it runs the Canal+ app with local and international content aggregated through a single subscription. In June 2025, just months after completing the MultiChoice acquisition, Canal+ struck a strategic Netflix bundling deal for 24 sub-Saharan Francophone African countries. Canal+ became the first operator to bundle Netflix subscriptions into traditional pay-TV offerings across the region.

The NBCU partnership made the structural incompatibility worse. The joint venture gave Comcast — a company with no strategic alignment with Canal+ — a 30% equity stake in MultiChoice’s streaming asset, ongoing licensing fees, and embedded cost structures that Canal+ couldn’t control. Canal+ was subsidising a third party’s position inside its own newly acquired business.

Then there’s the math. Canal+ acquired MultiChoice at R125 ($18) per share, valuing the group at approximately R35 billion ($2 billion). To justify that premium to its own investors, Canal+ committed to delivering R7.5 billion ($417m) in annual cost synergies from the combined group.

That’s just corporate speak for finding money. The single fastest way to find R7.5 billion in a business is to stop spending $272 million a year on a loss-making streaming service.

Saada was blunt about it. In January 2026, he told investors Showmax was “not a commercial success; it’s quite obvious.”

CFO Amandine Ferré added that the losses were “not acceptable.” David Mignot, the new MultiChoice Group CEO appointed by Canal+, told TechCentral just two weeks before the shutdown that Showmax “can’t continue” in its current form. His exact words: “Financially speaking, business-wise speaking, the thing is not flying.”

Canal+ had been in control for less than six months when it finally pulled the trigger.

Calvo Mawela stood on that stage in Johannesburg and described the beginning of a long march. He was right about the march. He was wrong about the direction.

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