👨🏿‍🚀TechCabal Daily – A Ripple in Flutterwave

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Nigeria’s financial institutions have spent the last few years trying to become ‘everything’ apps, i.e., they want to serve customers and merchants, offer payments, banking, lending, and everything possible in the financial ecosystem. Nigeria’s Central Bank (CBN) has had a look at that trend and said not so fast.

Here’s what happened: In a circular released on Monday, the regulator outlined new sets of rules on who owns payment companies, where payment data is stored, and how much of the payments ecosystem any one player can control.

Tell us who calls the shots: The CBN now wants payment companies to disclose their ultimate beneficial owners—the people who control a business, even when ownership is buried beneath holding companies or some complex corporate structures.

Keep payment data at home: From January 2027, payment transaction data generated in Nigeria must be stored on servers located in Nigeria. The goal is visibility and control. If payment data lives abroad, regulators have less oversight over it. Now, that doesn’t mean every company must build its own data centre. Operators can use local cloud providers and data centre facilities run by Rack Centre, MainOne, Open Access Data Centres (OADC), MTN, and other local infrastructure providers.

You can’t dominate both sides of payments: This is the rule that could reshape competition. The CBN says any institution controlling more than 25% of the consumer payments market cannot hold more than 15% of the merchant acquiring market, and vice versa. This means that if a financial institution becomes dominant in consumer payments (bank accounts, cards, or wallets), it won’t be allowed to build an equally dominant position in merchant payments, which includes payment gateways and infrastructure or PoS terminals.

What’s all this for? Nigeria’s digital payments ecosystem processed ₦1.2 quadrillion ($884.78 billion) in 2025. These rules are CBN’s blueprint for keeping Nigeria’s payments ecosystem from becoming too dependent on foreign infrastructure or difficult to supervise.

Fincra has officially secured its Enhanced Payment Service Provider licence. This regulatory milestone authorizes Fincra to directly collect, process, and settle payments in Ghanaian Cedis, offering a highly streamlined financial pipeline for businesses operating within the region. Start here.

Nigerian fintech unicorn, Flutterwave, has raised a Series E round at a $3.25 billion valuation after securing a ‘strategic investment’ from Ripple, the US payments company behind the XRP Ledger and RLUSD stablecoin. The company isn’t disclosing how much Ripple invested, but the deal gives Ripple an equity stake in Flutterwave and bumps up its valuation from the $3 billion it reached during its 2022 Series D round.

Are Series E rounds even a thing in Nigeria anymore? Not really. Nigeria’s startup ecosystem hasn’t seen many large late-stage raises in recent years. One of the last headline-grabbing examples was software company Andela’s $200 million raise in 2021. According to data from Briter Intelligence, early-stage deals have dominated African startup funding activity by volume in recent years as investors became more cautious. That’s why Flutterwave raising fresh capital at a higher valuation is notable.

What changes with this round? Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin and the XRP Ledger will now plug into Flutterwave’s infrastructure, allowing merchants and customers to send, hold, and convert money using stablecoins. The company expects the partnership to increase stablecoin transaction volumes on its platform. For Flutterwave’s customers, that could mean faster cross-border settlements and easier access to dollar-denominated value.

Flutterwave is assembling Stablecoin Avengers: The Ripple deal didn’t come out of nowhere. Over the past year, Flutterwave has been entering stablecoin partnerships. It joined the Circle Payment Network in 2025, integrated Polygon as a settlement layer in October 2025, launched stablecoin wallets with Turnkey and Nuvion in January 2026, and partnered with Tempo for settlement infrastructure in June 2026.

Viewed together, Flutterwave appears to be preparing for a future where stablecoins become just another way to move money, like bank transfers and card payments.

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Four weeks ago, Chimoney, a Nigerian-founded fintech that built cross-border payment infrastructure for businesses, announced it was shutting down after four years andunder $1 million raised. On Monday, founder Uchi Uchibeke posted something nobody expected:Chi Technologies, Chimoney’s parent company, has signed an agreement in principle to be acquired by CapitalSage Vantage Limited, a subsidiary of CapitalSage Holdings.

Why Chimoney?: Startup shutdowns mostly involve frozen accounts, unanswered emails, and founders who go quiet. Chimoney did the opposite. It notified investors in February, clients in April, published migration guides for developers, and kept refunding wallet balances on schedule through August. It also held onto something valuable: a hard-to-getPayment Service Provider (PSP) licence under Canada’s new retail payments regime.

What next? CapitalSage gets an instant, licenced entry into Canadian payments—something that typically takes months of regulatory legwork to build from scratch. Uchibeke, meanwhile, is moving on to build APort, a separate AI product unrelated to Chimoney.

Egypt’s National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (NTRA) hassigned a licencing agreement with Hassan Allam Digital Infrastructure to develop and operate a $400 million data centre in the country, the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology announced on Monday.