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Flutterwave CEO Olugbenga Agboola is widening his company’s ambitions past card and mobile money payments, betting that bank data will drive Africa’s next fintech boom.
Flutterwave said it has acquired Nigerian open banking startup Mono in an all stock transaction. People familiar with the deal put the value at $25 million to $40 million. The purchase closed in December 2025 and was announced Monday.
Agboola runs one of the continent’s biggest payment networks, helping merchants accept local and cross border transfers across more than 30 African countries. Mono brings a different kind of plumbing: application programming interfaces that let businesses, with customer consent, pull bank account data, verify identities and initiate direct bank payments.
"Payments, data, and trust cannot exist in silos," Agboola said in a statement, calling open banking a link that can make payments safer and credit decisions smarter.
Founded in 2020, Mono has raised about $17.5 million from investors including Tiger Global, General Catalyst and Target Global. Sources close to the transaction said all investors at least recouped their capital, while some early backers saw returns up to 20 times. Mono will keep operating as an independent product, the companies said.
Mono CEO Abdulhamid Hassan said its tools now sit behind most of Nigeria’s digital lending market. He said nearly all local digital lenders rely on Mono, which the startup says has powered more than 8 million bank account linkages, about 12% of Nigeria’s banked population. Mono also says it has delivered 100 billion financial data points to lenders and processed millions of direct bank payments. Clients include Moniepoint and PalmPay.
The acquisition lands as governments push lending led financial inclusion, while access to reliable credit data remains patchy. Credit bureaus in many markets are limited, leaving lenders to lean on transaction histories to judge income, spending and repayment capacity.
"If the economy is going to be credit driven, you need deep data intelligence," Hassan said. He added that regulators must also trust that customer funds and information are protected for open banking to scale.
Flutterwave said combining Mono’s data rails with its payments stack will let businesses onboard users faster, run bank account checks, score risk and set up one time or recurring account to account payments.
The deal adds to a short list of sizable fintech exits on the continent, where acquisitions remain uncommon. Infrastructure firms begin to consolidate around proven platforms.
