Paystack has officially entered Nigeria’s banking sector, acquiring Ladder Microfinance Bank and moving from payment processing to full-scale financial services.
The acquisition gives the fintech, owned by Stripe, direct control over deposits and lending, areas where small businesses usually face challenges.
The newly formed Paystack Microfinance Bank (Paystack MFB) will start by lending to businesses before gradually offering services to consumers. It will also provide banking-as-a-service (BaaS) products to companies developing financial solutions and treasury tools.
“After 10 years of building payment infrastructure and going deep, we realised that businesses needed more than just getting paid to grow,” Paystack COO Amandine Lobelle said. “We wanted to leverage the expertise that we have built over the last decade to continue to address some of the pain points that (businesses) have.”
Paystack MFB will operate independently alongside Paystack’s payments arm under the oversight of their US parent company. The two entities will collaborate within regulatory boundaries but maintain separate licences, governance, and product offerings.
This structure allows Paystack to experiment with deposits and loans without taking on the costs or regulations of a full commercial banking licence.
The acquisition comes after Paystack’s consumer-facing initiatives, including the launch of the Zap payments app, and positions the company to tap into Nigeria’s $32 billion small business financing gap.
In processing payments for over 300,000 businesses monthly, Paystack now has the data and infrastructure to offer loans, overdrafts, and merchant cash advances using live revenue flows rather than traditional financial statements.
“By having consistently high uptime, and making Paystack MFB the fastest, most dependable way to move money in and out of their account or to access it,” Lobelle said, outlining the strategy to make Paystack the primary bank account for businesses.
This approach sets Paystack apart from competitors. Digital-first banks like Kuda built deposits first, then layered in lending. Paystack starts from the infrastructure layer, using payment data to underwrite loans and optimise risk models.
It will compete with traditional microfinance banks such as LAPO, Accion, and Baobab, as well as embedded-finance players including Moniepoint, OPay, PalmPay, and Kuda.
Despite the expansion, partnerships with commercial banks like Titan Trust for payment processing remain unchanged. Paystack MFB also operates independently of Brass, another business banking venture backed by Paystack-led investors.
“Brass has its own team, investors. Just like any other financial services platform in Nigeria, Brass would be able to benefit from the banking-as-a-service services from Paystack MFB, but the two are independent,” Lobelle said.
In April 2025, the Central Bank of Nigeria fined Paystack ₦250 million ($190,000) for operating Zap as a wallet without approval. Regulatory clearance for Zap and now Paystack MFB emphasises the company’s compliance and points to trust from regulators in fintechs that meet standards.
Paystack’s strategy is to leverage its decade-long payments expertise to control more of the financial stack, address the SME funding gap, and build a bank that can scale with Nigeria’s internet economy.
“By adding Paystack MFB to our family of brands, we’re finding the right balance through combining the rapid innovation of a tech-first platform with the stability of traditional banking,” Lobelle said.
