How fintechs can navigate Africa’s regulatory maze

Kora’s Chief Legal Officer, Enyioma Madubuike breaks down what it really takes to navigate Africa’s fragmented regulatory landscape, from balancing growth with compliance to why localisation matters more than replication.

Africa’s fintech boom has unlocked cross-border payments, digital banking, and new financial infrastructure. But behind this growth is one major challenge: regulation.

For companies expanding across the continent, regulatory compliance is not just a legal checkbox; it’s a strategic function that can determine how quickly and effectively they scale.

Enyioma Madubuike, Chief Legal Officer at Kora, a cross-border fintech company, has spent the last few years building compliance systems from scratch and navigating regulatory frameworks across multiple African markets. His experience offers a grounded look into what it really takes to operate in one of the world’s most fragmented regulatory environments.

The foundation

Long before he was navigating regulatory complexities, Enyioma was helping people set up their first Yahoo Mail accounts and typing out documents in small business centres in the ancient city of Ibadan, where he grew up and got his primary, secondary and university education. 

Despite an early tech exposure, he followed a traditional path. Growing up in a lower-middle-income household, the career menu was limited: medicine, law, engineering, or accountancy. Law, for him, was less a calling and more a practical choice. 

“It was one of those courses that was open to me,” he says. “I didn’t like science, I didn’t like numbers much, so law felt like the natural option.”

Enyioma headed to the University of Ibadan for his law degree and, after his mandatory one-year stint at the Nigerian Law School, landed a role at one of Nigeria’s foremost law firms, where he cut his teeth. It was during this three-year stint that his initial dreams of becoming a courtroom advocate collided with the realities of the profession. In its place, he discovered a new interest. Banking deals, cross-border agreements, and structured finance transactions that offered a different kind of intellectual challenge, one that felt more aligned with his strengths.

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