African fintech has accounted for roughly 40–50% of total VC investment into the continent for the past five years. This is not a coincidence or a fashion. It reflects a structural reality: financial services are the connective tissue of every other sector.
You cannot build viable logistics without payments. You cannot build SaaS businesses for SMEs without financial data. You cannot build healthcare or agritech at scale without credit and insurance. Fintech's dominance is partially its own story and partially the foundation for every story that comes after it.
This will continue. But the shape of fintech opportunity is shifting.
The core infrastructure of consumer payments in Africa's largest markets — Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Ghana, Senegal — is largely in place. Mobile money, digital wallets, peer-to-peer transfers, basic neobanking. The companies that built this layer captured enormous value and are now well-funded and well-defended.
New entrants trying to replicate those businesses face a different market than existed in 2016. The incumbents have distribution, regulatory relationships, and capital. The opportunity for a new payment wallet targeting Nigerian consumers is meaningfully smaller than it was five years ago.
The most interesting opportunity in African fintech right now is not a standalone financial product — it's financial products embedded inside vertical software. A payroll platform that also does SME lending. A logistics OS that offers working capital against receivables. A restaurant management system that handles supplier payments.
This model has played out in every mature fintech market. In Africa, it's just beginning. The enabling condition — trust and data accumulated through SaaS relationships — is now in place for a handful of verticals.
Africa's most talented workers are globally distributed. Millions of Africans are employed by companies in Europe, the US, and the Gulf — and the financial plumbing for receiving, holding, and spending that income is still fragile. Dollar accounts, multi-currency wallets, cross-border payroll — this is a large, structurally growing market.
Corporate cards and spend management for African businesses is early. Most mid-sized companies still manage expenses manually, use personal cards, or wire money for each purchase. The companies building spend infrastructure — visibility, controls, reconciliation — are solving a problem that every business of a certain size eventually needs to solve.
"The consumer fintech wave is over. The B2B fintech wave is just beginning — and it will be bigger."
Several of our Fund I companies are positioned at exactly this second-generation layer. Eazipay in payroll and HR infrastructure. Flex Finance in spend management. AutoSpend in business banking. TemboPlus in API infrastructure. The thesis we had in 2022 — that the B2B layer was underinvested relative to its potential — has held up well.
For Fund II, we're looking at similar themes with one additional lens: companies that sit at the intersection of vertical software and financial services, where the data moat compounds over time and the competitive dynamics favour incumbents once they reach scale.