Flutterwave is placing a decisive bet on open banking as the future of African payments.

The continent’s largest payments technology company has acquired Mono, one of Africa’s most influential open banking infrastructure providers. The deal strengthens Flutterwave’s long-term strategy to move beyond card-centric payments and toward a more connected, bank-based, and data-driven financial ecosystem—one designed for trust, compliance, and scale across fragmented African markets.

Mono will continue to operate independently, with no changes to its leadership, team, or daily operations. Flutterwave’s stake is strategic rather than managerial, allowing Mono to keep innovating while its infrastructure becomes a foundational layer within Flutterwave’s broader payments stack.

The message is clear: in Africa’s next payments era, open banking is no longer optional infrastructure—it’s core.

Why Open Banking Matters Now

Africa’s payments growth has long been fueled by cards, mobile money, and patchwork integrations across banks and telcos. But those rails are increasingly showing their limits. Fraud risks remain high, onboarding is slow, verification is costly, and cross-market consistency is difficult to achieve.

Open banking promises a different model. By enabling secure, permissioned access to bank data and authenticated account-to-account payments, it shifts payments away from opaque intermediaries and toward direct, verifiable financial relationships.

Mono sits at the center of this shift. Its API-driven platform allows businesses to access bank account data, verify identities, and initiate direct bank payments across multiple African markets. These capabilities are becoming essential as regulators, enterprises, and consumers demand higher trust standards and better user experiences.

Flutterwave’s acquisition signals that this infrastructure is no longer a side feature—it’s a strategic pillar.

From Cards to Bank Rails: A Structural Shift

The deal reflects a broader industry trend: Africa’s payments evolution is moving away from cards and toward bank-based, locally relevant payment methods.

Globally, account-to-account payments and open banking rails are gaining traction as cheaper, faster, and more secure alternatives to card networks. In Africa, where card penetration is uneven and fraud costs are high, the shift is even more pronounced.

By integrating Mono’s open banking APIs, Flutterwave strengthens several critical areas at once:

• Faster onboarding through direct bank verification
• Stronger identity checks using trusted financial data
• Lower fraud exposure via authenticated payment flows
• Seamless account-to-account payments across markets

This positions Flutterwave to offer merchants payment experiences that are not only faster and cheaper, but also more compliant and conversion-friendly.

Strategic Alignment, Not Absorption

Notably, Flutterwave is not folding Mono into its operations.

Mono will remain operationally independent, retaining its leadership under founder and CEO Abdulhamid Hassan. This structure allows Mono to maintain its speed and product focus, while aligning strategically with Flutterwave’s scale, distribution, and merchant network.

For Mono, the acquisition validates open banking as critical infrastructure rather than speculative fintech plumbing. For Flutterwave, it avoids the innovation slowdown that often comes with full absorption.

It’s a partnership designed for leverage, not control.

What Businesses and Developers Gain

The immediate benefits extend well beyond Flutterwave’s balance sheet.

For businesses, the integration simplifies some of the most compliance-heavy parts of operating in Africa: identity verification, bank account validation, and fraud prevention. These processes are often fragmented across vendors and markets; open banking consolidates them into a single, trusted flow.

For developers and fintech partners, the deal creates a more unified environment where payments and financial data coexist. Instead of stitching together multiple APIs for payments, verification, and reconciliation, teams can build faster with fewer dependencies and lower operational risk.

For regulators and policymakers, standardized open banking infrastructure supports better data protection, clearer audit trails, and alignment with global security frameworks such as PCI-DSS and ISO 27001.

In short, this is infrastructure that makes the ecosystem easier to govern as it scales.

Laying the Groundwork for Stablecoins and Beyond

While the announcement focuses on payments and data, the implications stretch further.

Authenticated bank rails and open banking APIs are increasingly seen as prerequisites for regulated stablecoin and digital asset use cases. Over time, Mono’s infrastructure could enable open banking–powered stablecoin flows that are compliant, traceable, and integrated directly into merchant payment systems.

Flutterwave hasn’t announced specific crypto or stablecoin products tied to the acquisition—but the architectural groundwork is now in place.

As African markets experiment with regulated digital currencies and blockchain-based settlement, companies with trusted bank connectivity and identity infrastructure will have a significant head start.

Industry Context: Infrastructure Is the New Moat

The acquisition comes at a time when African fintech is shifting focus.

The last decade was defined by rapid customer acquisition and wallet proliferation. The next decade will be about infrastructure depth, margins, and defensibility.

Payments companies that control trusted data flows, verification layers, and bank connectivity are better positioned to:

• Reduce dependency on third-party networks
• Improve margins through direct rails
• Increase platform stickiness
• Expand into adjacent financial services

Flutterwave’s move mirrors similar global strategies, where payments leaders invest in foundational infrastructure rather than surface-level features. It’s less flashy—but far more durable.

Executive Perspective

Flutterwave CEO Olugbenga “GB” Agboola framed the deal as an infrastructure-first decision.

“Payments, data, and trust cannot exist in silos,” he said. “Open banking provides the connective tissue, and Mono has built critical infrastructure in this space.”

Mono CEO Abdulhamid Hassan emphasized continuity and scale, noting that the companies have collaborated since 2021. The acquisition, he said, allows Mono to build at the speed and scale Africa’s fintech ecosystem increasingly demands.

That history matters. This isn’t a cold acquisition—it’s a deepening of an existing strategic relationship.

The Bigger Picture

Africa’s digital economy is growing rapidly, but growth alone is no longer enough. The next phase demands systems that are interoperable by design, compliant by default, and trusted at scale.

Flutterwave’s acquisition of Mono is a statement that the future of African payments will be built less on cards and closed networks, and more on open, authenticated, bank-connected infrastructure.

It’s not just an expansion of product capabilities—it’s a redefinition of what payments leadership in Africa looks like.

And for an industry long constrained by fragmentation, that may be the most important development of all.