What Segun Agbaje won

Ships vs Speedboats

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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.

See you on Sunday