How Olugbenga ‘GB’ Agboola Built Flutterwave into One of Africa’s Leading FinTech Companies

In Summary

• Flutterwave processed about US $31 billion in transaction volume in 2024, with December alone recording over 25 million transactions worth more than US $500 million.
• The company raised a US$250 million Series D round in 2022 at a valuation of US$3 billion, making it one of Africa’s most valuable fintech startups at the time.
• Under GB’s leadership, Flutterwave has expanded across more than 35 African markets, secured multiple US money transmission licenses, and increased cross-border throughput (e.g. US–Africa) to nearly US $1 billion in H1 2025.

Deep Dive!!

Lagos, Nigeria, Monday, October 27 - Olugbenga “GB” Agboola leads Flutterwave, a payments infrastructure platform built to connect Africa’s fragmented commerce systems with global markets. Since its founding in 2016, Flutterwave has grown from a local payments startup into a pan-African financial technology company powering transactions for banks, global enterprises, and small businesses across about 35 countries.

By 2024, Flutterwave processed US $31 billion in total transaction volume, including a record US $500 million in December alone. The company’s Send App, licensed in over 30 U.S. states, achieved a 98% completion rate for remittance transactions in under five minutes, underscoring the platform’s operational efficiency. 

Nearly half of its merchant base received payments from new international geographies during the year, showing a strong cross-border growth curve. The platform currently supports 150+ currencies, with integrations across leading banks, card networks, and mobile money providers.

Flutterwave’s success is built on three structural foundations which are, a robust technology stack designed for scalability, a disciplined regulatory licensing strategy across major markets, and coordinated regional expansion aligned with Africa’s digital commerce evolution. As the company pivots toward profitability in 2025, its journey highlights the emergence of a homegrown African firm redefining financial infrastructure on a continental and global scale.

In this article, we take an in-depth look at the african founder behind that transformation exploring Olugbenga Agboola’s early life, education, and professional foundation, the inspiration that led to Flutterwave’s creation, the problems it set out to solve, and the lessons his journey offers to Africa’s next generation of entrepreneurs.

Early Life, Education, and Experience

Olugbenga “GB” Agboola was born in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1985, where his early exposure to Nigeria’s commercial and banking environment shaped his understanding of the continent’s structural payment challenges. Growing up in Lagos, a state for trade, finance, and technology, Agboola experienced firsthand the inefficiencies that plagued business transactions in Nigeria’s formal and informal sectors. This environment cultivated an early interest in technology as a tool to solve practical, large-scale problems.

Agboola’s academic background reflects a deliberate blend of technical, managerial, and security expertise. He studied at the University of Westminster in London, where he built his foundation in computing and information technology. To strengthen his expertise in cybersecurity and digital systems, he completed professional certifications from EC-Council University, where he earned recognition as a Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) and Certified Security Analyst (E|CSA). He later pursued advanced business and management studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Sloan School of Management, completing executive education programs that refined his understanding of global finance, innovation management, and organizational strategy. This academic path bridging computer science and business administration prepared him to lead technology ventures capable of navigating both technical complexity and regulatory scrutiny.

Before founding Flutterwave, Agboola accumulated more than a decade of experience in enterprise technology and financial services. His early career included key roles where he worked on PayPal-related payment integrations and later at Google, where he gained exposure to large-scale product operations and data security frameworks. In Nigeria, he worked at Standard Bank (Stanbic IBTC) as an enterprise infrastructure engineer, helping to modernize digital banking channels and internal transaction systems. He also held positions at Access Bank and First Bank of Nigeria, where he was involved in implementing core banking technology and e-payment solutions. These experiences gave him a comprehensive understanding of Africa’s banking limitations, especially the fragmented systems that made cross-border transactions expensive, slow, and unreliable.

By the time Agboola co-founded Flutterwave in 2016, he had developed a strong mix of technical expertise, institutional experience, and regulatory insight. His background allowed him to recognize that Africa’s payment problem was not simply technological but infrastructurally rooted in disconnected banking systems, inconsistent regulatory frameworks, and limited access to reliable APIs. This realization became the foundation upon which he built Flutterwave’s vision. To create a unified payments infrastructure capable of connecting Africa to the global economy.

Beyond his corporate roles, Agboola became increasingly involved in leadership and policy discussions around Africa’s digital economy. He was appointed to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s U.S. Africa Business Center, where he contributed to conversations on trade facilitation and digital finance. In recognition of his contributions to technology and entrepreneurship, he was awarded the Officer of the Order of the Niger (OON) by the Nigerian government. These recognitions positioned him not only as a fintech entrepreneur but also as a representative of Africa’s broader technological advancement on the global stage.

Through his combined experiences spanning engineering, cybersecurity, banking, and executive leadership Olugbenga Agboola built the technical and institutional foundation that would later enable Flutterwave to scale as one of Africa’s most sophisticated fintech infrastructures. His early life and professional journey demonstrate a consistent thread of purpose, leveraging deep technical knowledge to address Africa’s financial inefficiencies and create inclusive digital pathways for commerce.

Inspiration to Start Flutterwave

Before Flutterwave’s founding in 2016, Africa’s payments architecture was highly fragmented. In Nigeria, interbank transactions relied on the NIBSS (Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System), which only connected commercial banks and offered limited access to fintechs. Each bank maintained separate APIs and settlement protocols, forcing merchants to integrate with multiple banking systems just to accept payments from customers. Cross-border transactions are often routed through correspondent banks abroad, leading to delays of two to five business days, high foreign-exchange fees, and failure rates above industry benchmarks. This inefficiency translated into an estimated US $4–6 billion annual drag on African digital commerce.

Within this environment, Olugbenga “GB” Agboola’s years of technical work across payments, banking, and infrastructure revealed the precise contours of the problem. At PayPal and later in product and engineering roles within Nigeria’s banking sector, he observed that scalable transaction models required infrastructure modularity, redundancy, and interoperability not bespoke point solutions. These observations shaped the foundational product hypothesis of an API-first payments middleware that could unify card payments, mobile money, bank transfers, and USSD channels into a single integrable platform. Also managing settlement, reconciliation, and compliance behind the scenes.

Early architectural designs for Flutterwave employed modular microservices capable of routing payment attempts through fallback channels, dynamic reconciliation engines, and country-specific adapters. That allowed local failures, say, a mobile money downtime in Ghana to be rerouted without halting merchant experience. The system’s design anticipated heterogeneous internet reliability, multi-currency settlement, and asynchronous clearing features critical in African markets.

To validate that hypothesis, the founding team pursued key institutional linkages. Early partnerships with major Nigerian banks (such as Access Bank and Zenith) and global networks (Visa, Mastercard) allowed Flutterwave to transact directly into settlement rails rather than via intermediaries. These relationships reduced counterparty risk, accelerated onboarding, and elevated marketplace trust. Together with enrollment in Y Combinator, these connections provided both capital and institutional legitimacy.

Formation of the founding team itself was strategic. Agboola brought engineer-first discipline and payments systems design. Co-founder Iyinoluwa Aboyeji contributed operational scaling experience, fundraising networks, and knowledge of the African startup ecosystem. This alignment enabled the initial team to move from technical prototype to regulated operations without the disjointed transitions that often fail early fintech ventures.

Quantitative market sizing supported the opportunity case. In 2015, only about 10–12% of Nigerian merchants accepted digital payments, and cash and bank transfers remained dominant. Cross-border remittance corridors to and from Africa handled volumes exceeding US $40 billion annually, yet only a sliver moved through efficient rails. Merchant app developers often had to integrate with separate local gateways for each country limiting expansion. Against that backdrop, Flutterwave’s product thesis that one integration should access multiple African rails was not just elegant but economically necessary.

In short, Flutterwave’s founding was grounded in structural imperatives. The need to reduce latency, unify fragmented networks, and provide a technical abstraction for cross-border commerce. The design decisions API-first architecture, modular microservices, bank and card partnerships, and a co-founder team combining engineering and operations served that thesis. The result was a payments-infrastructure company rather than a consumer app, built to scale transparently across borders and markets.

What Problem Flutterwave Solves

The core problem Flutterwave addresses is Africa’s systemic payments fragmentation. The lack of a unified digital infrastructure to move money efficiently across borders, currencies, and payment methods. Before Flutterwave, businesses and developers faced a labyrinth of incompatible payment gateways, inconsistent bank APIs, and country-specific restrictions that made pan-African commerce nearly impossible to automate or scale.

Across Africa, over 80% of intra-African trade historically occurred through informal or manual channels due to disjointed banking systems and limited interoperability between mobile money and card networks. This created a fragmented landscape where moving funds from one market to another required redundant integrations, manual reconciliation, and high compliance overhead.

Flutterwave was designed as an abstraction layer that unifies Africa’s financial networks. Through a single API, businesses can now accept card payments, bank transfers, and mobile money from customers in over 35 countries, with settlement available in 150+ currencies. This architecture enables fintechs, global brands, and local SMEs to build on one standardized payment framework rather than adapting to dozens of isolated systems.

From a technical standpoint, Flutterwave solves three structural bottlenecks:

1. Infrastructure fragmentation: It bridges national payment systems by building connectors into banks, card networks, and mobile wallets. These integrations are standardized through one developer interface, reducing time-to-market for businesses entering new African countries from months to days.
2. Operational inefficiency: Flutterwave automates key operational areas including reconciliation, fraud screening, and transaction routing using machine-learning models to effectively analyze risk signals across diverse markets. This advanced approach has led to a significant and verifiable increase in transaction success rates for its merchants, notably improving performance compared to the typically high regional failure averages.
3. Regulatory asymmetry: African countries have divergent licensing frameworks, which historically forced companies to create separate legal entities or partnerships in each market. Flutterwave mitigates this through its broad licensing footprint, holding money transfer, payment service provider, and international remittance licenses in the U.S., U.K., Kenya, Nigeria, and other key jurisdictions. This allows it to serve global merchants with unified compliance, KYC, and AML standards while maintaining local regulatory alignment.

Beyond payment acceptance, Flutterwave has evolved into a digital economic infrastructure company. Products like Send App simplify remittances by providing real-time transfers between the diaspora and African accounts; Flutterwave Store supports small merchants in accepting payments online without code; and Swap, developed in partnership with Kadavra and Wema Bank, enables verified FX conversion for businesses and individuals. Together, these services demonstrate that Flutterwave’s scope extends beyond payment rails toward building the backbone for digital trade, remittances, and currency mobility across the continent.

At scale, Flutterwave’s infrastructure now supports hundreds of thousands of businesses from small retailers in Lagos to enterprise clients like Uber, Netflix, and Microsoft while handling annual volumes exceeding US $31 billion. More importantly, it offers a structural solution to one of Africa’s most enduring challenges - enabling money to move seamlessly within and beyond the continent.

Milestones Achieved to Date

Since its inception in 2016, Flutterwave has evolved from a Nigerian startup into one of Africa’s largest payments infrastructure company, achieving scale, regulatory depth, and enterprise adoption unprecedented on the continent. Its trajectory can be traced through four measurable dimensions which are transaction scale, market reach, regulatory licensing, and corporate milestones.

By 2024, Flutterwave processed over US $31 billion in annual payment volume, a sharp rise from roughly US $16 billion in 2022. December 2024 alone saw 25 million transactions worth over US $500 million, marking the company’s highest single-month throughput. Transaction success rates consistently surpassed 98% in real-time remittance flows, supported by redundant routing and dynamic risk scoring models.

Geographically, Flutterwave’s network now extends across 35+ African countries, including Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt, South Africa, Ghana, Uganda, and Senegal, as well as operational footholds in the U.K. and U.S. Its infrastructure supports 150+ global and local currencies and multiple settlement options, integrating directly with Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and regional mobile money providers such as M-Pesa and MTN MoMo.

On the regulatory front, Flutterwave achieved one of the most extensive licensing footprints of any African fintech. As of 2024, it holds over  30 U.S. state money transfer licenses, along with Payment Services Provider (PSP) and International Money Transfer Operator (IMTO) licenses in key African markets. In Nigeria, it operates under the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) as a licensed Switching and Processing Company, granting it direct access to NIBSS infrastructure, a privilege shared by only a handful of operators. This licensing architecture underpins its cross-border and merchant settlement operations, ensuring compliance with anti-money laundering (AML), counter-terrorist financing (CTF), and KYC standards across jurisdictions.

From a fundraising perspective, Flutterwave has raised over US $475 million across multiple rounds, with major investments from Tiger Global, Avenir, Green Visor, Greycroft, and Mastercard. Its Series D funding in 2022 valued the company at approximately US$3 billion, making it one of Africa’s highest-valued private startups. These funds accelerated the development of products like Send App, Flutterwave Store, Swap, and Tuition (a global education payments service connecting African students to foreign institutions).

Strategic partnerships also reflect Flutterwave’s enterprise maturity. The company powers payments for Uber, Netflix, Microsoft, and Air Peace, among others, while supporting major digital platforms like Booking.com and Wakanow. In 2023, Flutterwave signed a regional collaboration with Microsoft Azure to migrate core infrastructure workloads to the cloud, a move aimed at improving security, latency, and scalability across markets.

Flutterwave has also expanded into remittance and currency infrastructure. Its Send App launched in 2021 and now operates in 49 U.S. states, offering near-instant transfers to African markets. Meanwhile, its Swap platform, developed in partnership with Kadavra and Wema Bank under CBN oversight, facilitates retail FX access in response to ongoing liquidity challenges. These projects demonstrate a transition from payment facilitation to multi-product financial infrastructure, aligning Flutterwave closer to the role of a pan-African clearing institution.

Operationally, Flutterwave’s workforce grew to over 750 employees distributed across Africa, Europe, and North America, reflecting a globally networked structure designed for compliance, engineering resilience, and product localization. The company continues to emphasize enterprise governance, with the appointment of new independent directors and a restructuring of compliance operations between 2023 and 2024.

Taken together, Flutterwave’s milestones illustrate a company that has shifted from growth-driven fintech to systemic financial infrastructure provider, combining regulatory breadth, enterprise trust, and technological redundancy to anchor Africa’s digital commerce layer.

Lessons for Other Entrepreneurs

Flutterwave’s trajectory offers structural lessons for African entrepreneurs seeking to build scalable ventures in complex, regulation-heavy markets. Its evolution demonstrates that success in Africa’s technology ecosystem is less about speed of innovation and more about depth of infrastructure, regulatory foresight, and operational governance.

1. Infrastructure before branding.

Flutterwave’s early decision to prioritize backend payment architecture over consumer-facing branding was foundational. While many startups rushed into visible fintech services digital wallets, lending apps, or retail banking Flutterwave focused on building what others could build upon. This “invisible layer” approach created network dependency like once banks, global platforms, and local fintechs integrated Flutterwave’s API, they became structurally tied to its reliability. The result was a defensible position not driven by marketing, but by engineering necessity.

2. Regulation is not a barrier but a strategic moat.

Across Africa, fintech regulation is complex, often fragmented by country and jurisdiction. Instead of bypassing these barriers, Flutterwave treated licensing as infrastructure. By securing 31 U.S. state licenses and multiple Central Bank approvals in Africa, it gained operational legitimacy that competitors could not replicate quickly. This regulatory depth now functions as a competitive advantage as an asset class in itself. For entrepreneurs, the lesson is that compliance is not merely an obligation but a scaling strategy.

3. Partnerships drive legitimacy faster than capital.

While funding accelerates growth, Flutterwave’s early partnerships with banks like Access Bank and global networks such as Visa and Mastercard created trust and connectivity. These relationships opened payment corridors before venture capital scaled them. In Africa’s trust-dependent financial ecosystem, institutional collaboration can be more valuable than aggressive funding rounds.

4. Build for interoperability, not isolation.

Flutterwave’s system was engineered for integration, not competition. Its open APIs, modular design, and routing redundancy allowed merchants and fintechs to plug in rather than compete head-on. This interoperability mindset mirrors global infrastructure models (such as Stripe and Adyen) but is adapted to Africa’s fragmented realities such as mobile money, unreliable networks, and heterogeneous compliance regimes. For African founders, designing for inclusion rather than replacement often yields broader adoption.

5. Operational transparency sustains long-term survival.

Flutterwave’s rapid expansion also exposed it to scrutiny from internal governance questions to compliance reviews. Its response to corporate restructuring, independent board appointments, and stronger internal controls underscored the necessity of maturing operational culture as scale grows. For other founders, the key takeaway is that governance maturity must evolve alongside product maturity.

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