Flutterwave has bought Nigerian open banking startup Mono in an all-stock deal valued between $25 million and $40 million, bringing two key layers of Africa’s fintech infrastructure under one roof.
The transaction ties Africa’s largest payments company to the country’s most widely used open banking platform at a time when regulation, scale and survival are changing the fintech sector.
People familiar with the deal say Mono’s investors will at least recover their capital, while some early backers walk away with returns of up to 20 times. Mono will continue to run as a standalone product.
Mono was founded in 2020 to solve a basic problem most African fintechs face, which is that banks do not easily share data. Through its APIs, customers can give consent for businesses to access bank information, verify accounts, analyse income and spending, and trigger payments.
In a market where credit bureaus are thin and formal credit history is rare, transaction data has become the backbone of digital lending.
That model worked. Mono raised about $17.5 million from investors including Tiger Global, General Catalyst and Target Global. Its chief executive, Abdulhamid Hassan, says almost every digital lender in Nigeria now depends on Mono’s pipes.
The company says it has enabled more than eight million bank account connections, reaching roughly 12% of Nigeria’s banked population, and has delivered around 100 billion data points to lenders. Its client list includes Visa-backed Moniepoint and GIC-backed PalmPay.
For Flutterwave, the logic is different but just as direct. The company already handles local and cross-border payments across more than 30 African countries.
In March 2025, it raised $250 million in a Series D round that valued it at $3 billion, cementing its position as Africa’s most valuable startup. It also processed $31 billion in transactions in 2024. Payments alone, however, are no longer enough.
By acquiring Mono, Flutterwave moves deeper into onboarding, identity checks, bank verification, data-led risk assessment, and one-off or recurring bank payments, all within a single stack. This is more important now because Nigeria, its biggest market, has finally switched on open banking.
In August 2025, the Central Bank of Nigeria approved the country’s open banking framework, making Nigeria the first African nation to formally operationalise it. Banks are now required to share customer data through standardised APIs, as long as users give consent. That turns what Mono has been building quietly for years into regulated national infrastructure.
Flutterwave’s chief executive, Olugbenga ‘GB’ Agboola, describes the deal as a long-term play on how African finance will work. “Payments, data, and trust cannot exist in silos,” he said. “Open banking provides the connective tissue, and Mono has built critical infrastructure in this space.”
Hassan agrees that the timing is important. He argues that Africa is moving into a phase where credit, not just payments, will drive financial inclusion. But credit only works if lenders truly understand how people earn and spend, and if regulators trust the systems handling that data.
“If the economy is going to be credit-driven, you need deep data intelligence to know how people earn and spend,” Hassan said. “But at the same time, for open banking to really work, regulators need to be confident that customer funds are safe.”
That confidence is still forming. Open banking regulations across Africa are still uneven, and adoption will not happen overnight.
However, joining Flutterwave gives Mono reach it could not easily build on its own. Flutterwave already operates with licences, compliance teams and enterprise customers across dozens of markets. When regulatory barriers fall, Mono’s tools can scale faster without rebuilding that groundwork country by country.
“This allows us to expand what’s possible for businesses operating across African markets while staying grounded in security, compliance, and local relevance,” Agboola said.
The deal also aligns with a change in African fintech. For years, startups chased the dream of becoming standalone giants. Funding was cheap, growth was rewarded, and consolidation was rare. That world has shifted. Capital is tighter. Regulation is heavier. Scale now matters more than ambition.
In South Africa, Lesaka Technologies bought payments firm Adumo for $96 million in 2024, pulling two major players into one platform. Analysts see Flutterwave and Mono following the same strategy, integration instead of isolation. Globally, the logic is familiar.
Visa’s attempted $5.3 billion acquisition of Plaid in 2020, though blocked by US regulators, showed how valuable it can be to combine payment rails with data infrastructure.
Mono’s own journey reveals how competitive the space once was. When it launched, it faced companies like Okra and Stitch. Okra shut down in 2025. Stitch pivoted deeper into payments and raised more capital, changing its focus. That left Mono as the clear leader in Nigerian open banking APIs.
Hassan insists Mono was not pushed into a sale. According to PitchBook, the company raised $15 million in a Series A round in 2021 at a $50 million post-money valuation.
He says Mono is well aligned to reach profitability this year and still has cash in the bank. Raising another round, he adds, would have meant fresh valuation pressure in a tough market.
There is also a shared history. Both companies are backed by Tiger Global, which led Flutterwave’s Series C and Mono’s Series A. Hassan says Tiger did not broker the deal. Instead, it grew from years of collaboration, with Flutterwave and Mono already working together on bank payment products long before acquisition talks began.
African fintech is entering a more mature phase. Infrastructure is consolidating and regulation is meeting up.
