Last Updated on: 27th January 2025, 09:29 am
When Olugbenga “GB” Agboola founded the fintech startup Flutterwave in 2016, he articulated a very specific point of view. Instead of adhering to the growth-at-all-costs mindset that animates much of Silicon Valley, his company would pursue expansion only as it served the needs of its customer base.
“Our growth has been customer-defined, our expansion is always customer-driven,” Agboola said. “Where does the customer want us to be? We listen to the customer a lot in Flutterwave, in fact extremely. We have an extreme customer obsession in Flutterwave when it comes to what our customers want and how we deliver to the customer.”
Despite the clear benefits his company could bring — an e-payments system he hoped would span the whole of Africa and beyond — the idea of growing only in the direction of customers felt old-fashioned to many. For years, the defining operating principle of new tech outfits was to grow first and find customers second. The model for Flutterwave seemed backward.
But just five years after its launch, the company achieved unicorn status — a valuation of more than $1 billion. Today, it’s still going strong, having eclipsed the expectations of even its most ardent supporters.
“It was a lot of expansion that people did not even imagine possible,” Agboola said. “We’re the largest payment network today in Africa. We have the most licenses in Africa today. We have the most reach in Africa today. But imagine what we require to do that. It’s a lot of work, a lot of expansion, infrastructure initiative, playbooks built, tried, tested, we used, discarded if it doesn’t work. So many of that was done, and I think we’ve learned both the good and the hard way that our thesis makes sense.”
Now, the company is a success story, recognized across the globe for its innovative approach to the digital money revolution.
“We are focused on helping enterprises like Uber and Netflix get into Africa, also MBS as well, and also customers. We’ve been here for the past eight years now, since 2016, and we’ve been scaling payments across the continent,” he said. “We’re now live in 30-plus countries across Africa. We’re the largest in Africa by payment volumes, by expansion, by licenses covered across board.”
Even more impressive, the firm is still following the strategy he laid out at the very beginning — both in terms of physical expansion as well as in its ambitious fintech services line.
The Rise of Remittances
For many families across Africa, remittances — money sent home from overseas workers — are vital to maintaining a healthy standard of living. But it hasn’t always been easy for workers who left home in pursuit of greater economic opportunities to send their earnings back to their loved ones.
Before services like Flutterwave, many African families were unbanked. According to the African Digital Banking Transformation report of 2023, about half the continent’s population lacks access to a traditional banking account. While this trend continues today, the rise of online platforms has filled the gap, allowing families to access funds electronically without a traditional banking account.
But problems still persisted. African families fortunate enough to have access to remittance service often encountered a raft of fees to use their money. From the high cost of converting their money into local currency to the fees associated with withdrawing physical money, many remittances suffered from nickel-and-dime charges that added up to large percentages of total earnings.
That’s why Send App, the remittance service from Flutterwave, has become so popular. Now spread across multiple continents, including North America and Europe, Send App allows overseas workers to transmit funds back home to family and friends without all of the complications and extra fees associated with similar products.
Remittances through Send App have helped families buy groceries, pay medical bills, buy clothing, and more. But they’ve also been a boon to economic opportunities for generations that were previously cut off from traditional loans. Many local startups and small businesses have found seed money through remittances, allowing budding entrepreneurs to build local ventures at home without incurring severe debt.
Educational Opportunities
In addition to remittances, Flutterwave offers other products and services designed to effect positive change in Africa. One example is Tuition, an educational funding app that launched in 2023.
For many decades, African families found economic momentum through higher education opportunities for their children. But even when African students were able to pass entrance exams and secure admittance to elite universities in places like London and Paris, or even other countries across the continent, many never got to attend. That’s because very few educational institutions accepted payment in local African currency, and by the time school fees were calculated and a bill was sent to the family, it was often too late to begin the long and arduous process of converting local currency into a form that schools would accept.
This led to widespread frustration and a host of missed opportunities for career advancement.
With a slogan that promises to “power up your education,” Tuition was designed to solve those problems. In the same way that Flutterwave’s core service was launched to increase the speed and security of moving money across national borders, Tuition allows students to easily pay school fees in their native currency. The app automatically converts the payments into an acceptable form of payment, meaning that families never have to worry about meeting quick payment deadlines.
While the expansion of Flutterwave’s services has been impressive, its core mission remains the same. It’s always been about trying to empower Africans through new technology, Agboola said.
“The goal was, ‘How do we do something that makes it easy for a business to scale using an advanced payments infrastructure?’ That was the driving force,” he said. “In the future — for small business, international finance, large multinational business, and the African continent — all the barriers will be broken down.”
