On January 5, 2026, Flutterwave, Africa’s largest fintech company, announced the acquisition of Mono, one of Nigeria’s largest open banking startups, in a deal worth between $25 million and $40 million.
Beneath the press release lies a more serious reality. One of Africa’s largest payment processors now controls the API rails that competing fintech companies rely on to function.
Mono CEO Abdulhamid Hassan claims that almost all digital lenders in Nigeria rely on the company’s infrastructure to assess creditworthiness and initiate bank payments.
Mono further claims to have facilitated over 8 million bank account linkages covering approximately 12% of Nigeria’s banking population. It also claims to have provided 100 billion financial data points to financial companies and processed millions of direct bank payments.
Customers include Moniepoint, backed by Visa, and PalmPay, backed by GIC. Both companies offer lending products that require the credit scoring and account verification APIs provided by Mono, but the extent of their dependence on Mono’s infrastructure and alternative solutions remains unclear.
The deal is structured as a simple infrastructure business, and Flutterwave says Mono “will continue to operate independently, with no changes to leadership, team, or day-to-day operations.”
The reality is that all of Mono’s customers, including competing fintech companies, are now building on infrastructure owned by Flutterwave.
API infrastructure status
Open Banking is a system that allows financial data (such as account balances and transactions) to be shared securely and with consent with approved third-party providers (fintechs, other banks) via APIs.
Open Banking APIs are the plumbing of digital finance. Instead of each fintech digging its own pipe to each bank, companies like Mono offer a shared pipe that carries data and payments between dozens of banks and hundreds of apps.
Mono “connects to over 50 banks” and allows businesses to “access aggregated customer-authorized financial data, facilitate payments, and verify identity and account ownership.” This is why so many lenders and payment apps rank Mono above them.
However, things are not the only players in town. Another major company is Okra, a pioneering open banking API startup in Nigeria that raised around $16.5 million but decided to wind down in May 2025, returning between $4 million and $5.5 million to investors, reducing competition among open banking/API providers in Nigeria, and increasing the dominance of Mono and similar companies.
Another player worth mentioning in the ecosystem is OnePipe, a Nigerian embedded finance startup. The company has raised a $3.5 million seed round to “converge banking and fintech APIs” and help banks digitize and partner with fintechs. However, it’s worth mentioning that OnePipe is more of a banking-as-a-service/embedded financial platform than a strict “open banking” data aggregator like Mono.
As founder Ope Adeoye puts it, OnePipe is “aggregating APIs through direct banking APIs and partnerships with third-party APIs like Mono,” indicating that some of the OnePipe-powered products will also eventually ride on Mono’s rails.
Even OnePipe, if its architecture is maintained post-acquisition.
Margins are dependent on the infrastructure currently owned by Flutterwave.
For Nigerian fintech companies competing with Flutterwave, choosing an open banking API provider may now mean uncomfortable trade-offs. Consolidate with the market leader, who is also your biggest competitor, or bet on a smaller player with thinner coverage and more volatile uptime.
Mono powers data sharing, account verification, and bank payments. any identity
Checks, balances, inquiries, or payments are potentially chargeable events.
Switching providers means reintegrating these flows across KYC, data, and payments. Developers and founders regularly describe this as a multi-month task in the context of embedded finance.
As such, Mono’s business will have to pay to switch providers, and existing customers will be locked in for a long period of time.
Visa plaid shadow
In January 2020, Visa agreed to acquire Plaid, a data aggregator and open banking platform that links apps like Venmo, Chime, and Wise to users’ bank accounts via API, for $5.3 billion.
Later that year, in November 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a lawsuit seeking to block the acquisition, forcing both parties to mutually terminate the merger agreement before trial.
Visa argued that Plaid was complementary, not competitive, emphasizing that Plaid’s data pipes would help Visa support innovation for developers, financial institutions, and consumers, but the Justice Department wasn’t having it. They argued that the “merger would eliminate emerging competitors, further entrench Visa’s dominance in the online debit market, and harm consumers.” It was shown that the measure was for consumer protection.
The Justice Department just created a new fintech division within its antitrust division, signaling more aggressive oversight of payments and data-intensive transactions going forward. In its complaint, the Justice Department cited as evidence of anticompetitive intent that Visa CEO Al Kelly internally characterized the acquisition as an “insurance policy” to neutralize “threats to the company’s critical U.S. debit business.”
By targeting infrastructure companies like Plaid, the Justice Department signaled that managing consumer financial data pipelines is not just a privacy or security issue, but a competition issue. The incident has added new uncertainty to the strategies of incumbent companies looking to acquire rather than build a response to fintech threats.
The breakup between Visa and Plaid marked one of the clearest statements yet that U.S. antitrust enforcement will move to protect not only current rivals in the digital payments market, but also potential future competitors.
In contrast, Nigeria has just finalized its Open Banking Operating Guidelines for 2023, which focus on consent, licensing and security, but say little about what happens if a core infrastructure provider is acquired by a powerful company or shut down.
In M&A scenarios, there are no explicit Plaid-style safeguards governing infrastructure monopolies or required data handover protocols, leaving a gap that Flutterwave-Mono is currently exposing. U.S. regulators blocking Visa-Plaid is exactly why African fintech companies should be concerned about Flutterwave-Mono. When a dominant payment network controls the data layer above bank accounts, it gains visibility into competing payment methods and the ability to undermine or seize rivals that rely on its infrastructure.
The Promise of Independence and the Trap of Integration “Mono will continue to operate independently, with no changes to its leadership, team or day-to-day operations,” Flutterwave said, adding that the investment “brings strategic alignment rather than operational control, allowing Mono to maintain its pace of innovation while contributing its open banking infrastructure to Flutterwave’s broader payments ecosystem.”
My sincere question is: What does “strategic alignment” mean for banks and fintechs that compete with Flutterwave for payments but rely on Mono for data and A2A (account-to-account) payments?
If both Flutterwave and another large client need the same features, who sets the pricing and feature roadmap? And why is there no mention in public documentation of the China wall, data isolation policies, or independent governance of competitively sensitive information?
Competing fintech companies will be left speculating about how “strategic alignment” will shape pricing, prioritization of features, and long-term dependencies on infrastructure layers currently owned by competitors.
Analysts pointing to Okura’s closure argue that unlike in mature markets where regulators mandate robust data governance and exit plans, Nigeria’s young open banking regime has yet to prove it can manage the systemic risks posed by holding on to or failing infrastructure providers.
With the removal of Okra and the acquisition of Mono, Flutterwave will have the only true national open banking platform in Nigeria, and OnePipe will focus on embedded finance through bank partnerships.
There is no clear alternative that equally covers banks and digital lenders in Nigeria. The deal “suggests a broader inflection point for African fintech, with startups that once aimed to become standalone giants increasingly likely to find better outcomes by integrating into larger platforms.”
For new infrastructure entrants, the catch-22 is tough. Getting clients requires multiple bank integrations, but without clients you can’t justify the cost of integration. On the other hand, it competes with Flutterwave, which can bundle discounted access to Mono’s API with payment processing.
“If the economy is going to be credit-driven, we need deep data intelligence to know how people earn and spend,” argued Mono’s Abdulhamid Hassan. Therefore, once that intelligence flows through the pipes owned by Flutterwave, there is a risk that every digital lender’s underwriting logic will be at least partially visible to powerful payments rivals higher and lower in the stack.
What happens next?
Flutterwave makes it clear on its Mono acquisition microsite that it aims to build something akin to an “operating system for African trade.” TechCrunch and others have confirmed that Mono is “powering domestic and cross-border payments in more than 30 African countries,” and that Mono can add onboarding, identity verification, account verification, risk, and interbank payments into a single stack.
Nigeria issued operational guidelines for open banking in March 2023 and will be fully implemented in August 2025, but while these rules encourage competition and standardization of APIs, they say little about what happens if core parts of the infrastructure are acquired by a powerful company or quietly shut down.
Will the CBN eventually treat open banking providers as systemically important infrastructure, with special rules regarding ownership, pricing, and data portability?
Can competing fintech companies realistically afford to build an in-house API stack to escape Mono, or will the burden of bank integration and compliance make it difficult?
Is OnePipe, with its bank partnership model, the only reliable domestic alternative that can quickly match Mono’s coverage? The question is not whether Flutterwave will abuse its new position in infrastructure. The question is whether African fintech companies and their regulators can afford to know that.
If the plumber also owns the water supply, other people are just renting the pipes.
About the author
Babatunde Fatai leads emerging technology strategy and implementation at MTN Nigeria, building solutions that drive digital transformation and profitability across Africa’s largest telecommunications market.
