The panel, moderated by Olumatoyin Abioye, fintech product lead, featured Musty Mustapha, co-founder and managing director of Kuda MFB, and Rosemary Aimankhu, chief commercial officer of MoMo PSB.

“Every decision you make in a business has its implications, and it has its cost,” Mustapha said. 

“When you operate with the mindset of growing at all costs, regardless of whether you are really adding value to people’s lives, you are only solving for today and neglecting what could happen in the future.” 

He stressed that African users are digitally aware but operate in low-trust environments, meaning fintechs must design products that build value, not rely on incentives for user acquisition.

Aimankhu reiterated this point, noting the need to understand the context of users. “When we have the context of who those billion users are, we can actually create the value that is speaking about. It’s very, very important,” she said. 

She added that operational weaknesses are usually the first to fail as companies scale, highlighting the importance of preparing systems for growth from the outset.

Mustapha explained that the early months of a fintech’s life often leave operations underdeveloped because priorities focus on product and software development. 

“Anything or any area of a business you are not giving 100% attention to is the area that will cause problems as you scale,” he said. 

He recommended building flexibility into growth strategies and adjusting priorities over time, from customer acquisition to compliance, and eventually revenue.

On the question of trust, Aimankhu said reliability is indispensable. “You are available when I want, I can close my eyes and say, when I make this transfer, the person at the other end is going to get it. If the person does not get it, I begin to doubt,” she said. 

Mustapha added that infrastructure beyond fintechs’ control, like roads, electricity, and identity systems, is a limiting factor, and businesses must plan with redundancy to mitigate these constraints.

The panel also explored which fintech models will dominate mass adoption. Aimankhu predicted embedded finance would prevail for low-end smartphone users, noting the importance of affordable, reliable services for everyday payments. 

Mustapha highlighted the competitive advantage of combining fintech agility, telco distribution, and strong balance sheets from traditional banks.

The challenges startups avoid acknowledging has always been an issue to be addressed, and Mustapha stressed that assumptions about average users are common. 

“A lot of us still continue to have this conception of what an average user is. What they want is just that you create political trust,” he said. 

Aimankhu further added that leveraging local community networks is essential to gaining customer trust.

The discussion ended on balancing tough decisions between staff and customers. While Aimankhu said, “The customer is the reason why we’re here. You can reorganise internally to reposition that staff, but never prioritise your staff over your customer.” 

Mustapha, on the other hand, noted that a business should avoid ever having to make such a choice, maintaining both staff and customer support to keep operations stable.

Reaching the next billion users in Africa is not simply about rapid growth, but creating value, building trust, and preparing operationally for unpredictable scale.

Speaking during an exclusive fireside chat titled ‘Beyond the Hype: What it really takes to build technology that scales in Africa,’ the serial entrepreneur and investor dismantled some of the most popular assumptions in African tech, challenging founders to rethink almost everything they believe about building technology on the continent, including the belief that scale begins with funding.

Aboyeji said that raising money is not the hardest part of building a technology company in Africa, and it may be the most overrated.

“When you want to build beyond the hype in the world that we live in today, you also have to build beyond Africa. So when you say what it takes to build technology companies that scale in Africa, that’s a very limiting title, because you should be thinking beyond Africa.”

For Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, who has co-founded Andela, Flutterwave, Moove and investment firm Future Africa, scale does not start with geography, pitch decks or capital. It starts with the biggest perspective most founders avoid. Companies that last are not built for locations. They are built for people.

“The most important thing any business needs is a unique understanding of its customers. Technology transcends more than geography, and it’s more adaptive to psychographics than it is to geography.”

This misunderstanding, he said, is why many founders begin by copying Silicon Valley playbooks rather than defining what technology can truly do for their customers.

“A lot of people start off trying to figure out what Silicon Valley is doing, and I’m going to just build the Nigerian version.”

That approach, he said, usually leads to companies that look successful on the surface and raise money, but it rarely builds companies that reach scale and serve millions.

“You can have a successful company, depending on how you measure success, by copying Silicon Valley, but in terms of scale, in terms of a product that goes deep into serving billions of customers, I’ve just never seen it work.”

The myth in African tech

Iyinoluwa Aboyeji repeatedly returned to what he described as the most damaging belief in the ecosystem. “The big myth that a lot of people have is that the most important thing you need for a startup is investment.”

Capital, he said, is not the foundation of scale. Customers are. “The most important thing any business needs is a unique understanding of their customer that is sufficiently differentiated from others, but comes from a place of real depth.”

He illustrated this with the origin of Moove, the mobility fintech he co-founded. The company started by addressing what seemed to be a Lagos problem, where drivers needed cars but could not afford to buy them.

“What we didn’t realise was psychographic about that was that the problem of drivers without cars is a global problem.”

The insight became clear once the team stopped viewing the issue as local. “You go to London, all those drivers don’t own the cars they’re driving. You go to Dubai, Germany. When you break out of your geographic and demographic barrier, and you start going into the psychographic world, you’re going to unlock products that are global by nature.”

Why product–market fit is rare

Asked how founders should think about product–market fit, Aboyeji dismissed the way the term is usually used. “You have to have an obsession with your customers. When I say obsession, I don’t mean it lightly.”

As an investor, he said his firm reviews thousands of pitch decks but stops only when something genuinely unfamiliar appears. “We only stop to look when we see something that we’ve not seen before.”

He used a portfolio company, Filmmaker Smart, as an example, whose founding idea went against the dominant thinking in Africa’s creative economy.

“Their core thesis was that nobody needs a movie studio. It’s too expensive and it doesn’t fit the way film is made in Africa.”

At the time, the idea sounded unreasonable. Today, the company is backed by IFC and Sony, generates six- and seven-figure revenues annually, and is used by major studios.

“Somebody who understands a customer understands how to reimagine a world that they need to live in.”

Teams fail before products do

On building teams, Aboyeji spoke about where many founders go wrong. “I see a lot of people spend a lot of equity and money hiring engineers that don’t actually know anything about their markets.”

Skill alone, he said, is not enough.

“If the person who’s actually going to be touching the product and building the product doesn’t have insight, you’re actually better off just using a contracting agency.”

What matters most, especially for co-founders, is commitment. “Passion is actually a Greek word that means something you’re willing to suffer for.”

He warned founders against carrying unwilling partners or begging co-founders to work. “If the moment you’re working with somebody who doesn’t feel a need to sacrifice, just know you’re alone.”

The cost of taking bold steps

Reflecting on his own “big bold step,” Iyinoluwa Aboyeji pointed to his decision to leave Andela at a time when the startup had Mark Zuckerberg as an investor and was already a large, successful business.

“I could have just stayed there, but I wouldn’t be a three-time founder if I didn’t make that move.”

The move to Flutterwave came with no safety net. “That entire first year there was no salary. I was borrowing money from my wife. That was my girlfriend.”

He described weekly flights between Lagos and San Francisco, sleeping on planes, and working across continents simply to keep the company alive.

Starting again, he said, has since become second nature.

On failure

Iyinoluwa Aboyeji addressed failure without trying to soften it. “The definite outcome of every startup is death.” What separates founders, he argued, is how they treat that reality. “There was a business that failed. It wasn’t you.”

He shared stories of early ventures that collapsed, near expulsion from university, and pivots that only worked after initial ideas failed. “Every company you see failed its way to becoming successful.”

The one thing founders must stop doing

During the rapid-fire round at the Conference, Aboyeji was asked what founders must stop doing if they want to succeed.

“Raising money.”

He explained why. “Because customers are how you get money. Capital is customers.” 

Partaining the future, his outlook was: “African talent will dominate artificial intelligence.”

“Stop copying, stop chasing investors, understand customers deeply, and accept failure as part of the work.”