Konga invested $2.7M in a stablecoin startup, the reason says everything about Nigerian payments

The Lagos Business School hosted the E-commerce and Payments Forum on June 4, convening operators, payment infrastructure providers and logistics executives to examine the structural barriers slowing digital commerce in Nigeria.

The forum ran three sessions across resilience, infrastructure and last-mile logistics, with a keynote from Nnamdi Ekeh, CEO of Konga, that opened the day with the sharpest news peg in the room.

Konga bets on stablecoins

Ekeh announced that Konga has invested $2.7 million in Stable, a stablecoin payments startup, framing the investment as a direct response to the friction that continues to make international transactions costly and slow for Nigerian businesses.

Nnamdi Ekeh, CEO, Konga

“Nigeria’s competitive advantage is supposed to be manufacturing. There is human capital, but we still need to make international payments possible,” he said. His diagnosis of the problem was direct. “Most of the barriers to the conversation are influenced by a lack of infrastructure.”

Ekeh was careful to separate the underlying technology from its more speculative associations. “Every tech has a dark side. The question is how do you abstract the positive side,” he said. On Stable specifically, his argument was about simplification rather than disruption. “Stablecoin abstracts complexity and middlemen, and I want this to get to the last mile.” The investment shows Konga’s intent to embed alternative payment infrastructure directly into its commerce operations.

One of the sessions brought together Damilare Ogunnaike, VP at Moniepoint Group, Melvin Onochie, VP of Omni-Channel Sales and Commercial Planning at Konga Group, and Kenny Isichei, Head of Business Operations at Bumpa, to discuss what resilience actually looks like under sustained macroeconomic pressure.

Ogunnaike described Moniepoint’s approach as built on three pillars: supporting multiple payment methods so no customer is left without an option at checkout, building redundancy so that every payment method runs through at least two processors, and offering overdraft facilities to merchants so they can keep operating when shocks hit.

“If one processor is down, route this transaction to another,” he said. He also argued that the prepayment problem in Nigerian e-commerce is solvable, but only through systemic reform. “Fix chargeback, fix refund, customer trust increases. There is no single platform where one can log an issue, and it goes immediately to all participants in that payment. That is simply what we need to fix.”

Onochie anchored his remarks in a blunter argument: resilience begins with unit economics, not investor narratives. He described Konga’s decision to stop subsidising logistics as a correction that was overdue.

He also made the case for what he called being “asset right” rather than asset light, pointing to Konga’s warehousing network across Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt as infrastructure that simultaneously serves internal operations and third-party logistics partners.

Isichei offered a more granular take on subsidies, drawing a distinction between subsidies that drive activation and those that build the habits that create retention. Bumpa’s wallet cashback programme is structured toward the latter.

“The real question is what type of merchants are you getting in, and what is that behaviour like when the subsidy runs out,” he said.

Logistics margins, rider databases and the EV case

Another session, moderated by Ugonna Ginigeme, CEO of Feegor, examined the gap between what fulfilment operators can deliver and what e-commerce players promise their customers.

Charles Ejekam, Group Executive Director at Red Star Express

Charles Ejekam, Group Executive Director at Red Star Express, described a low-margin sector in which customer expectations have accelerated while the economics have not.

“Anybody who does logistics and declares 10% margin is doing excellently well, and that is global,” he said. He noted that Red Star has responded through strategic partnerships rather than fleet expansion, extending last-mile reach while protecting standards built across 34 years of operations.

Reni Onafeko, General Manager of Glovo Nigeria, described the platform’s city-level optimisation as a constant balancing act across restaurant density, rider supply, delivery radius and earnings per trip.

She outlined a three-stage rider quality process covering onboarding, training, including a partnership with the FRSC on road safety, and ongoing retention through tiered rewards. She also raised the absence of a cross-platform rider history database as a structural gap, comparing what it would take to what the BVN did for financial services.

Akin Akinbogun, Vice President at Qoray, made the economic case for electric vehicles in corporate mobility, noting that operating costs per kilometre for EVs are 30-50% lower than those of fossil-fuel vehicles. He described Qoray’s approach of co-locating charging infrastructure in hotels and venues with captive power to sidestep grid unreliability, with close to 300 vehicles charging nightly across six Lagos stations.

He argued the sector needs two things to scale: financing models that lower the upfront cost barrier and standardisation of charging infrastructure to prevent fragmentation.

Olu Akanmu

Olu Akanmu, co-convener and Executive in Residence at the Africa Retail Congress, closed the forum with a call for collaboration over parallel infrastructure building and a reminder of what all the complexity ultimately comes back to.

“It comes down to the customer and what the customer wants. For business leaders and academia, the decision really is how do we keep our focus on the customer, and how do we keep the businesses alive so that those same businesses can deliver for tomorrow.“