By Deborah Nnamdi
Flutterwave, Africa’s largest fintech company, has acquired Nigerian open banking startup Mono in an all-stock transaction valued between $25 million and $40 million, marking a major consolidation in the continent’s financial infrastructure space.
The deal brings together two key fintech infrastructure providers as Flutterwave moves to deepen its payments stack with open banking, financial data, and identity verification capabilities. Under the agreement, Mono will continue to operate as an independent product, with no changes to its leadership or day-to-day operations.
The acquisition allows Mono’s investors to at least recover their capital, with some early backers reportedly recording returns of up to 20 times their initial investments.
Flutterwave disclosed that Mono’s platform enables secure access to financial data, identity verification, and account-to-account payment services—capabilities that are becoming increasingly important as African markets transition toward authenticated, bank-based payment systems.
Speaking on the transaction, Flutterwave Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Olugbenga ‘GB’ Agboola, said the acquisition reflects the company’s long-term vision for Africa’s financial infrastructure.
“Payments, data, and trust cannot exist in silos. Open banking provides the connective tissue, and Mono has built critical infrastructure in this space. This acquisition allows us to expand what’s possible for businesses operating across African markets, while staying grounded in security, compliance, and local relevance,” Agboola said.
Mono’s Founder and CEO, Abdulhamid Hassan, described the deal as a natural progression of an existing relationship between both companies, which began with a partnership in 2021. He said the combination of Mono’s open banking capabilities and Flutterwave’s scale would create a more comprehensive and defensible platform.
“Mono’s capabilities across financial data access, direct bank payments, and identity verification, combined with Flutterwave’s unmatched scale and global reach, create something more defensible and comprehensive,” Hassan said.
Flutterwave noted that integrating Mono’s open banking APIs will enhance faster merchant onboarding, improve verification processes, reduce fraud, and enable seamless account-to-account payments across multiple African markets. The collaboration is also expected to simplify compliance-intensive processes such as identity checks and bank verification, while providing developers and ecosystem partners with a more unified infrastructure environment that reduces complexity and accelerates product development.
The company added that the acquisition strengthens Flutterwave’s vertical depth, potentially delivering stronger margins, deeper platform stickiness, and more differentiated infrastructure. From a regulatory standpoint, the deal is expected to support greater standardisation, improved data protection, and compliance with global security standards, including PCI-DSS and ISO 27001.
Africa’s fintech ecosystem is increasingly shifting away from card-dominated payment systems toward bank-based and alternative payment methods, with open banking emerging as a critical enabler of trusted data sharing and new financial products. By acquiring Mono, Flutterwave is positioning itself to play a more central role in shaping the next phase of payments growth across the continent, particularly as demand rises for interoperable systems that support scale, compliance, and cross-border innovation.
Mono was founded in 2020 after Hassan left Paystack, at a time when open banking was not yet widely discussed in Nigeria. Hassan has said he believed early on that financial data, not just payments, would power the next generation of fintech. Five years later, Mono has reportedly processed over 150 billion transactions, served more than seven million users, and expanded its operations into Kenya and Ghana.
