Waving Goodbye To Andela, Hello To Flutterwave

The startup world is rife with promise and peril, and those who would help transform the payments industry are known to be risk-takers, rarely satisfied with the status quo and brave enough to wade into the complex waters that are payments.

It might have been a matter of curiosity and, in some corners of the payments universe, surprise to learn last month that Iyinoluwa Aboyeji departed from Andela, Mark Zuckerberg’s talent accelerator devoted to Africa and tech training, to start Flutterwave. With offices in the U.S. and Africa, Flutterwave aims squarely at Africa and the digital payments infrastructure the continent needs to bring transactions beyond the realm of cash.

The firm itself, according to reports heralding Aboyeji’s new gig, is building out its infrastructure using APIs to help enable payments across different options and, in a pan-African manner, stretching across Visa, ACH, cash tokens and eWallets.

In an interview with Karen Webster, Aboyeji stated that the API allows for users in Africa to send and receive money across the aforementioned conduits, a continuum that could be a boon to cross-border transactions. As much as half of the global workforce, said the executive, will be located in Africa by the end of the next two decades, opening the door for new and robust payments options, a necessity really in making sure that workers and firms are paid on time with speed and security.

The move to embrace a software model will do much to help ensure Flutterwave’s (live, thus far, in Nigeria and Ghana) success, with flexibility as a key component to fostering adoption among various payments stakeholders, from banks to consumers. In response to Webster’s query as to why his API model may succeed where others have failed, Aboyeji said that “there is a lot going on” in the African payments infrastructure, and other payments firms operating in the region have not been able to create a single connection to all of the various ways that the people of Africa can pay — which, most of the time, isn’t about using cards — and to do it in a way that works across the continent.

That “obsession with single markets … Nigeria or Kenya,” he says, “fails to consider the bigger picture and, as such, can’t scale across Africa.” This is because many of those firms operate as regulated payments companies in Africa, with roadblocks to quick adoption of technology and large-scale deployments. Aboyeji stated: “It takes six months to get a mobile money license in Nigeria and months thereafter to move into another country.” Conversely, he added, Flutterwave “works with banks, partnering with some of the largest pan-African banks, working [across] channels to enable merchants to process transactions from a variety of funding sources.” He says that the pie is big enough that “you are not going to have a payments network that dominates everybody at every turn.”

Looking beyond the country-by-country creep that has bedeviled other firms in the region, Aboyeji posited that another way Flutterwave can take the baton where others have failed comes with the fact that the team in place at the company is comprised of professionals with a decidedly large-scale view of FinTech and payments platforms, with positions filled by former employees of Google Wallet, PayPal and also African banks. The continued emergence of a strong developer community working with, and building upon, the API functionality is another competitive strength, added Aboyeji.

The flexibility of the API model, said Aboyeji, means that the cash which dominates payments today also stands as an option for payments, with a network of 10,000 agents throughout Africa, where the transaction can occur with fiat currency changing hands (and via mobile devices). The firm has already made transactions with Uber Nigeria, Access Bank, Paystack and Page Microfinance and supports large merchants, like Uber, who seek to do business in the country.