Semiloore Akoni is a growth and product marketing leader focused on consumer technology, fintech, and digital commerce across Africa. With over a decade of experience in marketing and more than seven years in tech, he has built and scaled products across marketplaces, payments, and platform ecosystems. His work centres on user acquisition, activation, and retention, with a strong emphasis on solving adoption challenges and turning product value into clear, scalable growth channels.
- +👨🏿🚀TechCabal Daily – Banking on Flutterwave
I help shop-owners find the right people who actually need what they are selling.
I help shop-owners find the right people who actually need what they are selling. Then I make it very easy for those people to try the product for the first time. After that, I make sure they like it enough to keep coming back, and even tell their friends about it. It is about helping them get the right customers who see value quickly and stay.
Most people in growth and marketing believe retention is something you fix later. They think that once users sign up, you can bring them back with emails, notifications, or discounts.
That thinking is flawed. Retention is already decided before the user signs up.
If someone joins because of hype, a giveaway, or a discount, they are not there for the product. They are there for the incentive. The moment that the incentive disappears, they leave. No lifecycle strategy fixes that.
But if someone joins because the product solves a real problem they have, retention becomes natural. You are not convincing them to come back. You are fitting into something they already need.
The same mistake appears in localisation. Many companies translate words. They do not translate behaviour to suit the country in which they operate.
They assume users in different markets think the same way, respond to the same triggers, and trust the same systems. That is not true. Real growth comes from understanding how people actually behave in that market, how they spend, how they trust, how they decide.
If you get that wrong at acquisition, everything that comes after is damage control.
Downloads feel like progress, but they are not. They tell you how many people showed interest for a moment. They do not tell you if anyone actually used the product in a meaningful way. A product can have thousands of downloads and still be failing silently.
How many users reach a meaningful first action, how quickly they get there, and how many come back to repeat that action?
If those numbers are weak, growth is an illusion. You are measuring attention, not value.
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When Flutterwave, a pan‑African fintech, acquired open banking startup Mono in January 2026, the expectation was deeper open banking integration and tighter rails. It has now secured a national microfinance banking licence as part of that deal. Public information indicates that Mono owned a microfinance banking subsidiary before the deal, which likely came as part of the bundle, even though it was not highlighted in the initial acquisition announcements.
What this licence does for Flutterwave: For nearly a decade, Flutterwave has reportedly processed over $40 billion in payments, and in that time, it mastered one thing above all else: moving money. Until now, banks and third‑party providers largely handled custody and settlement in the background. With a microfinance banking licence in its stable, Flutterwave can bring more of that stack in‑house: it can hold customer funds within regulated accounts, issue account numbers, extend credit, and settle more transactions on its own infrastructure instead of relying as heavily on partners.
What does this change? Beyond the new Flutterwave Bank subsidiary, owning a bank can improve margins by cutting out some intermediaries that previously took a slice of each transaction. The trade‑off is that a banking licence brings heavier scrutiny: capital and liquidity requirements, stricter governance, and more intrusive compliance checks. Flutterwave now has to behave less like a pure software company and more like a regulated financial institution.
The competition is already there: Flutterwave is not the first member of the “fintech turned bank” club. Most of the largest consumer‑facing fintechs operating in Nigeria, including Moniepoint, OPay, PalmPay and Paystack (which acquired Ladder Microfinance Bank in January), now control microfinance banking licences or similar charters, signalling that this is where the sector’s centre of gravity is moving.
For payments‑only players, high volumes but thin take‑rates limit profitability because so much economics leaks to underlying banks and processors. Banking changes that equation: with a licence, a fintech can sit on deposits, price credit off its own balance sheet. Flutterwave can use data and infrastructure like Mono’s as an underwriting engine, turning what used to be a pure pipes business into a potential credit machine.
Flutterwave has never been shy about using partnerships to get what it wants. Before obtaining its own switching and processing licence in 2022, it leaned on payment service banks and commercial banks to plug into domestic payment systems, while banks provided the accounts and rails that end‑users actually interacted with. Historically, that meant Flutterwave orchestrated flows that landed in partner banks’ ledgers; with a banking licence in the group, more of those balances and the economics attached to them can accrue to Flutterwave itself, bringing it in line with peers who see “fintech plus bank” as the future of the industry.
Equinix, a global company that builds data centres, is expanding its geographical and operational footprint in South Africa. The company is planning to build an additional 160 megawatts (MW) of data centre capacity on a newly acquired 327,000m² of land in both Johannesburg and Cape Town. As part of this expansion, the company will be funnelling R7.5 billion ($443 million) into its South African operations.
Why this is huge: Equinix, which first marked its Africa entry with a MainOne acquisition in 2022, has been operating out of Johannesburg, South Africa, since 2024. It operates a 172MW facility still under construction, with plans to now expand that by an additional 160MW. Compared to Nigeria, Equinix currently operates an 8.16MW colocation site in Lagos, with plans to expand by 17MW; this makes South Africa one of its largest operating markets on the continent.
