As Flutterwave CEO, Olugbenga “GB” Agboola has driven an ambitious vision – democratizing payments and financial access across the vastly underserved African market. The Nigerian entrepreneur’s fintech juggernaut is building the unified digital infrastructure to move money between the continent’s 54 distinct nations seamlessly.
“There are so many problems to solve on the continent. There is still a huge population that is not even banked at all,” Agboola states. “It will be explosive in the next 10-20 years as we harness these opportunities.”
Flutterwave was conceived after Agboola, a former software engineer at tech giants like PayPal and Google, witnessed firsthand the arcane inefficiencies plaguing cross-border payments in Africa during his banking career. Simple transactions between countries could take days as money was unnecessarily routed through the U.S. before arriving at its final destination.
“If you get on a plane, you get there faster than doing a money transfer,” he recounts of the clunky legacy systems. “You might as well take the money in a bag.”
Launched in 2016, Flutterwave’s cloud-based infrastructure bridges banks, telcos, and fintechs across Africa into one seamless digital payments ecosystem. The network enables everything from rapid salary disbursements for multinational companies to secure e-commerce purchases for individual consumers using their preferred payment method.
“If mobile money is popular in your market, we make that available. We support bank transfers if it’s bank transfers,” explains the Flutterwave CEO. “But we also help businesses operate across the continent seamlessly.”
More than just creating payments infrastructure, Agboola is sparking an entrepreneurship renaissance by opening access to the modern digital economy for the first time. Small merchants can instantly sell goods across borders while startups rapidly scale using Flutterwave’s regulatory and operational expertise.
“We are enabling the entrepreneur to reduce poverty and create value for stakeholders,” Agboola states, citing one Flutterwave customer who crowdfunded microloans for African women farmers.
The CEO has taken an educational, collaborative approach to navigating daunting compliance regimes rather than attempting to disrupt them. Flutterwave prioritizes transparency to “build trust equity,” with regulators and consumers wary of misinformation.
“Every regulation is important to the regulator, and if you want to operate in these markets, you must respect the local policies,” Agboola explains his philosophy. “The regulators know their countries better than we do as a third party.”
Under his leadership, the agile fintech has rapidly expanded and pivoted its platform based on market demands. During COVID-19’s economic disruption, Flutterwave launched an e-commerce marketplace to digitize more businesses and unleash vital income opportunities.
Now valued at over $3 billion after becoming Africa’s highest-valued unicorn startup, Flutterwave is just beginning to hit its stride. Agboola envisions a future where Africans seamlessly “start businesses anywhere” using integrated payments, logistics, and digital selling tools.
“I find that vision of enabling the entrepreneur and small business owner very exciting because of what it promises,” the Flutterwave CEO states. “We’ve been able to build this payments infrastructure for Africa, and that technology is making it easy for businesses to accept payments and grow. This is what drives us.”
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