How Mitchell Elegbe built Interswitch into the sovereign payment rail of Africa

In Summary

• Following a difficult 2023 impacted by foreign exchange volatility, Interswitch achieved a 50% revenue surge to ₦137.5 billion for the fiscal year ending March 2025, yielding a ₦14.7 billion profit after tax.
• Elegbe pioneered Verve, Africa’s first successful domestic card scheme, which officially surpassed the 100 million cards issued milestone in December 2025, becoming the continent's largest homegrown payment network.
• Beyond consumer apps, Elegbe built the "Switch" , the technical plumbing that processes billions of transactions annually and serves as core switching and processing infrastructure for Nigeria’s banking and digital payments ecosystem.

Deep Dive!!

Lagos, Nigeria, Tuesday, December 24, 2025 - Across Africa, the movement of money has historically been hindered by the "physicality" of cash. As recently as the early 2020s, the vast majority of transactions in Sub-Saharan Africa were still conducted in cash, creating significant friction for economic growth.

Mitchell Elegbe recognized that the problem wasn't a lack of money, but a lack of "rails." In 2002, he founded Interswitch, an integrated payments and digital commerce company designed to serve as the central nervous system for African finance. Unlike many contemporary fintechs that focus on the user interface, Elegbe focused on the "switch," the invisible backend that allows different banks and businesses to communicate.

What distinguishes Interswitch is its role as a sovereign asset. By creating the Verve card scheme, Elegbe gave the continent a domestic alternative to global giants like Visa and Mastercard, keeping transaction data and fees within the African ecosystem. Today, Interswitch is the infrastructure upon which Africa’s digital economy is built.

By achieving one of Africa’s first "Unicorn" valuations in 2019 and processing over ₦23 trillion in transactions, Elegbe’s strategy has remained consistent. He built for longevity, prioritized profitability, and solved for the entire ecosystem rather than a single niche.

Early Life, Education, and Experience

Mitchell Elegbe was born the youngest child of his family in Benin City, Edo State, Nigeria. His early childhood was marked by a defining tragedy, as his father passed away before he was born, leaving him to be raised by his mother in a household where resources had to be managed with extreme care. He eventually moved to Aladja, a steel-industrial town in Delta State, to live under the guardianship of his uncle. This move proved pivotal, as his uncle was a strict disciplinarian who instilled in him the values of hard work and academic focus, providing the stability and guidance necessary for a young man growing up in a challenging environment.

His secondary education in Aladja laid the groundwork for his admission to the University of Benin (UNIBEN), where he chose to study Electrical and Electronics Engineering. During his undergraduate years, the financial pressure of being a student in a developing economy forced Elegbe to find creative ways to support himself. He identified a gap in the market for high-quality music on campus and launched a cassette recording business. He would travel several hours to the commercial hub of Onitsha to buy high-grade blank tapes, take them to a professional recording studio to dub popular music, and sell them to his peers. When the market became saturated with cheaper, lower-quality tapes, he demonstrated his first act of entrepreneurial agility by switching the business to selling shirts. This period at UNIBEN was essential in shaping his dual identity as both a technical engineer and a pragmatic businessman who understood that technical excellence must be matched by market demand.

Upon graduation, Elegbe entered the professional world during a period of massive technical shifts in the Nigerian banking sector. He was posted to Computer Systems Associates (CSA) for his National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) year. At CSA, he was part of a specialized team working on the implementation of the SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications) network for Nigerian banks. This was a high-stakes engineering environment that introduced him to the "plumbing" of global finance which is the invisible protocols that allow banks to exchange data and value securely. This experience provided the foundational technical blueprint he would later use to build Interswitch.

Following his service year, Elegbe’s technical prowess earned him a spot at Schlumberger Wireline and Testing, a global leader in oilfield services. He was sent to Scotland for intensive training as a Field Engineer, an experience that exposed him to international standards of operational excellence and high-pressure problem-solving. He returned to Nigeria to join Telnet, an ICT consulting firm, where he eventually rose to become the Group Head of Business Development, using his unique blend of SWIFT technical training and global field engineering experience to pitch the revolutionary idea of a national transaction switch.

Inspiration to start Interswitch

The drive to establish Interswitch was born from a convergence of personal frustration and a high-level technical realization that Nigeria’s financial economy was fundamentally broken. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Nigerian banking was entirely localized which means a customer’s relationship with their money ended at the doorstep of their specific bank branch. 

While working at Telnet, Mitchell Elegbe was tasked with selling transaction-switching software to banks. He quickly discovered that the banks were not interested in buying expensive, complex software that they had to manage themselves. This rejection shifted his perspective. He realized that the problem was not a lack of technology, but the lack of a neutral, shared infrastructure. Instead of being a vendor selling a product, he decided he needed to be an operator providing a service, a "utility" that all banks could plug into to communicate with one another.

It was during a cold night in Scotland that a personal frustration planted the seed for his future venture. While trying to withdraw money, an ATM malfunctioned and "swallowed" his card, leaving him without funds in a foreign land. This failure of technology in a developed market led him to reflect on the even greater challenges facing Nigeria, where such infrastructure was nonexistent. 

However, it also highlighted a massive opportunity. If a system in a developed nation could provide such convenience (when working), the potential for a similar, more robust system in Nigeria was immense. He saw that Nigeria needed a central nervous system, a "Switch", to manage the data and trust required for those machines to work across different banks.

The final spark for Interswitch was Elegbe’s refusal to accept the "one-man business" model typical of the Nigerian era. He envisioned a corporate structure that mirrored the global giants he had studied. To bring this to life, he partnered with the global consultancy firm Accenture to develop a rigorous business plan and a governance framework that would appeal to institutional investors. In a bold and highly unconventional move, Elegbe successfully pitched this vision to a consortium of seven competing Nigerian banks and Telnet, raising an initial ₦200 million (approximately $1.2 million in 2002). Most remarkably, Elegbe launched the company with zero percent equity, choosing to be an employee-CEO. He believed that the mission of building a sovereign national payment rail was more important than immediate ownership, betting that his value as a founder would be recognized through execution rather than a cap table, a gamble that eventually defined the professionalized landscape of African fintech.

What problem Interswitch solves

Interswitch was built to reshape the systemic fragmentation that characterized the African financial landscape at the turn of the millennium. Before its intervention, Nigeria operated as a series of disconnected "banking islands" where a customer’s financial reach was strictly limited to the physical walls of their specific bank branch. The movement of value was slow, manual, and localized, creating a massive "friction tax" on the entire economy. Mitchell Elegbe’s architecture created a unified, real-time clearing house that allowed the entire nation’s financial institutions to function as a single, interoperable network.

1. Elimination of Banking Silos: Before 2002, an ATM card issued by one bank could not be used at a machine belonging to another. Interswitch built the central "Switch" that allowed for real-time, cross-bank interoperability, ensuring that any cardholder could access their funds at any terminal nationwide, regardless of the bank logo on the machine.

2. Reduction of Cash Dependency: In an economy where "Cash was King," the logistical burden of physical currency security risks, transport costs, and manual counting errors acted as a drag on GDP. Interswitch provided the digital rails to move transactions from physical bags of money to secure electronic pulses, significantly lowering the operational cost of commerce.

3. Institutionalizing Trust through EMV Standards: Early electronic systems in Nigeria were plagued by security vulnerabilities. Interswitch championed the migration from magnetic stripe cards to Chip-and-PIN (EMV) technology, providing a globally recognized security standard that protected users from fraud and built the public trust necessary for digital adoption.

4. Digitization of Bill Payments: Before the launch of Quickteller, paying utility bills or school fees required standing in physical queues for hours. Interswitch aggregated thousands of billers and merchants onto a single digital interface, allowing millions of Nigerians to settle obligations 24/7 from their mobile phones or computers.

5. Sovereignty over Payment Data and Fees: Historically, African banks relied on international networks like Visa or Mastercard for even local transactions, which meant paying fees in foreign currency and sending data abroad. By creating Verve, Interswitch provided a domestic "sovereign rail" that kept transaction fees and data within the continent, reducing costs for local banks.

6. Real-Time Settlement and Liquidity: In the legacy system, merchants often waited days for funds to clear. Interswitch’s infrastructure enabled T+1 (and eventually real-time) settlement, ensuring that businesses had immediate access to their capital, which is critical for the survival of small and medium-sized enterprises in volatile markets.

7. Infrastructure-as-a-Service for Fintechs: By opening its APIs, Interswitch solved the "barrier to entry" problem for hundreds of other startups. Instead of every new company having to build its own connection to the banks, they could plug into Interswitch's pre-built rails, effectively acting as the foundational infrastructure upon which the entire African fintech ecosystem is now built.

The impact of solving these problems is visible in the sheer scale of the network today. What began as a solution to a broken ATM system has evolved into a pan-African utility. By focusing on the "plumbing" of finance rather than just the interface, Interswitch has made itself the indispensable backbone of the continent's digital transformation, proving that the most successful businesses are those that solve foundational, systemic failures.

Milestones achieved to-date

The evolution of Interswitch from a local Nigerian switch to a pan-African infrastructure giant is best illustrated by its extraordinary financial recovery and expansion milestones in 2025. Following a challenging 2023 fiscal year marked by currency volatility, the company achieved a landmark turnaround for the period ending March 2025. According to regulatory filings, Interswitch’s revenue surged by 50% to reach a record ₦137.5 billion in 2024. This growth translated into a decisive return to profitability, with the group posting a ₦23 billion pre-tax profit and a ₦14.7 billion profit after tax. These figures underscore the resilience of Elegbe’s infrastructure-first model, which relies on high-volume, mission-critical transactions that remain essential even in turbulent economic climates.

A core driver of this performance has been the explosive growth of Verve, which has officially moved beyond being a "Nigerian alternative" to become a dominant continental force. In December 2025, Verve reached a defining industry milestone by surpassing 100 million cards issued across Africa. This achievement represents a fundamental shift in the continent’s financial sovereignty, as Verve now facilitates transactions in local currencies across a network that includes over 185 countries through strategic global partnerships. As of 2025, Verve alone accounts for nearly 40% of Interswitch's total group revenue, reinforcing its status as the largest domestic card scheme on the continent.

Beyond traditional card services, Interswitch has aggressively diversified its technical capabilities and regulatory footprint to capture the next wave of African digital growth. In May 2025, the company secured final approval from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) for a Mobile Money Operator (MMO) license for its subsidiary, M-Kudi. This pivot, combined with the acquisition of a Tier-5 Mobile Virtual Network Enabler (MVNE) license, positions Interswitch to bridge the gap between telecommunications and banking. 

Furthermore, the company has expanded its physical operations and strategic presence to include Kenya, Uganda, Gambia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), while being recognized by CNBC and Statista as one of the "World’s Top Fintech Companies" in 2025. These milestones collectively validate Mitchell Elegbe’s long-term vision of a borderless, sovereign African payment ecosystem.

Lessons for other entrepreneurs

The path of Mitchell Elegbe provides a distinct blueprint for building a resilient enterprise within a volatile emerging market. Unlike the traditional "blitzscaling" model that prioritizes rapid user acquisition at the expense of fiscal health, Elegbe’s philosophy is rooted in institutional sustainability and foundational problem-solving. His journey from a salaried engineer to the architect of a pan-African unicorn offers a masterclass in how to navigate the unique complexities of the African business environment by focusing on structural impact rather than temporary hype.

1. Build for Profitability from Day One: While modern venture capital often encourages a "burn now, earn later" approach, Elegbe steered Interswitch to become profitable by its second year of operation. He maintains that in Africa, where capital markets are thin and interest rates are high, a business must demonstrate immediate value to survive.

2. Prioritize Infrastructure over Applications: Most founders seek to build "apps" that sit on top of the system, but Elegbe chose to build the system itself. By solving for the "plumbing" of the underlying payment rails he made Interswitch an indispensable utility for banks, government agencies, and even his own competitors.

3. The Power of Institutional Governance: From inception, Elegbe partnered with global firms like Accenture to create a transparent, board-led structure. This commitment to "corporate" over "one-man" management was instrumental in attracting blue-chip investors like Visa and Helios Investment Partners, who valued the company’s institutional stability.

4. Execution over Initial Equity: Elegbe started Interswitch with almost no equity, taking a salary to lead a vision he believed in. This "impact-first" mindset proves that for founders, creating massive value and gaining the trust of a board can lead to significant ownership rewards later through performance-based equity and sweat equity.

5. Domestication of Global Standards: Elegbe did not just copy Western models but adapted them. By launching Verve, he proved that an African brand could outcompete global giants by tailoring technology to local fraud realities, offline needs, and the specific cost-sensitivities of the African consumer.

6. Longevity Requires Constant Diversification: A pioneer cannot stay static. Elegbe’s move from switching to card schemes (Verve), then to consumer platforms (Quickteller), and now to mobile money (M-Kudi) demonstrates that market leaders must cannibalize their own success to stay relevant.

7. Collaborative Competition (Co-opetition): One of Elegbe’s greatest feats was convincing seven rival banks to fund the launch of a shared utility. He mastered the art of "co-opetition," showing that sometimes the best way to win is to build a platform that helps your competitors succeed alongside you.

Ultimately, Mitchell Elegbe’s legacy is a testament to the fact that Africa’s greatest opportunities lie in its biggest inefficiencies. By viewing the continent's lack of financial infrastructure not as a barrier, but as a blank canvas, he built a sovereign asset that has fundamentally changed how a billion people interact with money. His story encourages the next generation of African founders to move beyond superficial solutions and instead build the deep, technical foundations that will support the continent’s future for decades to come.

As Interswitch enters its third decade, its strategic focus has shifted from pure transaction switching to building a deeper, more integrated digital commerce infrastructure. The company’s expansion into mobile money, telecommunications enablement, and multi-sector payment services signals a future where Interswitch functions not just as a processor, but as a foundational layer supporting everyday economic activity across Africa. Elegbe’s enduring insight remains clear: the most powerful businesses in emerging markets are not always the most visible, but the ones that quietly make everything else work.