Olugbenga Agboola Talks Building Infrastructure and Enabling Business Growth in Africa
Growth in any capitalist market requires access to money, but in many parts of Africa, cash has been notoriously non-fungible. That is, until Olugbenga “GB” Agboola launched Flutterwave and began the process of building a new payment infrastructure across the continent.
Flutterwave is a payment company that allows corporations, small businesses, and individuals to pay for goods and services and move money across national boundaries quickly — a first-of-its-kind innovation on the African continent.
Originally built to help large organizations more quickly move money, Flutterwave has been growing exponentially since Olugbenga Agboola first launched the payments service in 2016. Since then, the company has become the first unicorn in Africa and was more recently valued at over $3 billion during its last fundraise.
Now, the Nigerian fintech operation has become the backbone of Africa’s e-payment operations and expanded its reach across the globe, allowing more users to connect with—and pay—people in Africa.
The success has gone far beyond what founder Olugbenga Agboola originally envisioned, when he first struck out on his own to build a new company intended to help solve a few specific problems for African corporations.
“So, I used to work for a bank called Standard Bank of South Africa. In that bank, I was responsible for technology and building solutions. We had one client, MTN South Africa, and they were going to expand across Africa and provide a lot of jobs and money to people. However, the process to simply pay their staff salaries in Nigeria became a hassle,” he said. “Now, they had money to pay the salaries of their staff. It was possible technologically, but it was operationally impossible for us to pay the salary of their staff in Nigeria, even though as a bank we had operations in both countries. So imagine it. This company has a staff in Nigeria. To pay that staff, they had to go to the bank, but the bank said, ‘We can’t pay those salaries for you.’ And they’re asking, ‘Why? You're in both countries.’ And they say that it’s just not possible without a 0.5% fee and a wait time of several days. And I thought that was just crazy and needed to change.”
He looked deeper at the issue and realized that banking in Africa was unnecessarily complicated. To transfer money from one country to another often meant going to a bank, which would route the payment to the United States, then back to Africa. The process was slow and wasteful.
Having worked on the cutting edge of modern banking technology with companies like Google and PayPal, Olugbenga Agboola knew technology existed to fix these seemingly intractable payment problems with African banks.
“I saw the pressing need to build a payment infrastructure that would connect every type of payment together,” he stated. “So that banks in Africa could make transfers in seconds, instead of days, and it would still be as inexpensive as making a local, in-country transfer. I wanted to model it off the payments systems I’d worked with when I was in the United Kingdom and the U.S. And, so far, that’s exactly what Flutterwave has been able to accomplish.”
Starting in 2016, Olugbenga Agboola began the process of building the technology and meeting with stakeholders. He needed buy-in from Africa banks and governments to help make the process workable. His appeal was simple: Flutterwave would provide the technology. They just had to agree to let it function.
His argument was persuasive. He showed the value of building a modern payment system that would create efficiencies in the African market, reduce unnecessary costs, and improve the economic prospects of companies of all sizes, from multinational corporations operating within the continent to smaller businesses that hoped to expand beyond their founding borders, and more.
“In the last seven-plus years, we’ve built the infrastructure for Africa, and that technology basically now makes it easy for a small business in Nigeria to pay someone in South Africa, and they get the money instantly,” Olugbenga Agboola explained. “It can help a large enterprise merchant, like Uber, to pay Uber drivers in Africa and they will get paid immediately as well. So that’s how I see it. That’s what we’re doing here.”
While it’s already built an impressive payments services operation, Flutterwave shows no sign of slowing down. Although it’s grown from a humble startup to a flourishing business, it retains the agility — and ability to pivot — of a recently founded tech darling.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the company founded by Olugbenga Agboola pivoted to launch a new marketplace that allowed small companies and individuals in Africa to sell their wares online, allowing Africans new streams of revenue during an economic crisis. And new products continue to roll out.
“We’re doing everything we can to help,” Agboola said. “It’s just what we do.”
