Flutterwave now owns the infrastructure its rivals depend on
Flutterwave has acquired Mono, but at the same time, it now owns an infrastructure most of it rivals depend on, here's what it means.
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On January 5, 2026, Flutterwave, Africa’s largest fintech company, announced its acquisition of Mono, one of Nigeria’s biggest open banking startups, in a deal valued between $25 and 40 million. <br />
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Buried beneath the press releases lies a more consequential reality: one of Africa’s largest payment processors now controls the API rails that rival fintechs depend on to function. <br />
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Mono CEO Abdulhamid Hassan claims that nearly all Nigerian digital lenders rely on the company’s infrastructure to assess creditworthiness and initiate bank payments. <br />
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Mono further claims to have powered more than 8 million bank account linkages, covering roughly 12% of Nigeria’s banked population. It also claims to have delivered 100 billion financial data points to lending companies and processed millions in direct bank payments. <br />
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Customers include Visa-backed Moniepoint and GIC-backed PalmPay. Both companies offer lending products that would require the credit-scoring and account-verification APIs Mono provides, though the extent of their dependency on Mono’s infrastructure versus alternative solutions remains unclear. <br />
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The deal was framed as a straightforward infrastructure play, and Flutterwave says Mono will “continue to operate independently, with no changes to its leadership structure, team, or day-to-day operations.”<br />
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The reality is that Mono customers, which also included rival fintechs, are now all building on infrastructure owned by Flutterwave.<br />
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The API infrastructure landscape<br />
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Open Banking is a system that allows secure, consent-based sharing of financial data (such as account balances and transactions) with authorised third-party providers (Fintechs, other banks) via APIs. <br />
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Open banking APIs are the plumbing of digital finance: instead of every fintech drilling its own pipe into each bank, companies like Mono provide shared pipes that carry data and payments between dozens of banks and hundreds of apps. <br />
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