Why Flutterwave bought Mono and what controlling Africa’s financial data layer unlocks

Since its inception in 2016, Flutterwave has built its business on helping African merchants accept cross-border payments, largely by connecting card networks and local processors. Now, Africa’s most valuable startup wants to control the financial data layer behind those transactions, and it has acquired open banking startup Mono to do it.

The all-stock transaction, valued between $25 million and $40 million, represents a significant consolidation of the African financial infrastructure layer as the region’s digital economy shifts away from legacy card networks toward bank-linked payment systems.

Under the deal, Mono will remain an independent unit, with chief executive officer Abdulhamid Hassan keeping control of day-to-day operations. The deal stops short of operational integration, meaning Mono will retain technical autonomy while tapping Flutterwave’s licences and footprint across more than 30 countries. Flutterwave did not immediately say whether the transaction would affect Mono’s staff headcount. 

The exit follows a period of consolidation in which Moni raised $17.5 million from investors, including Tiger Global and Target Catalyst. Despite its status as a leading open banking player, Mono navigated a market marked by fragmented technological standards at local banks and a regulatory environment that often lagged behind technical innovations. 

Still, joining Flutterwave means Mono has secured a path to scale that avoids the friction of independent regional expansion and the hurdles of maintaining custom integrations across diverse banking systems. 

For Flutterwave, owning the data behind the payments it processes is strategic. It can evolve beyond a payment processor into a financial institution capable of offering credit-related services, while also strengthening its core payments stack through account-to-account transfers.

Mastercard, a global payment processor, similarly acquired Finicity for $825 million in 2020, in a deal that integrated Finicity’s open‑banking APIs and real‑time financial data access into its own open banking platform. After the acquisition, Mastercard now supports lending, risk scoring, identity verification, and bank payments. 

An infrastructure super stack 

The transaction marks a vertical integration of the data and settlement layers within the African market. Flutterwave is evolving from a payment gateway into a comprehensive stack provider and will absorb Mono’s API-driven platform to manage identity verification, financial data access and account-to-account (A2A) payments in a single product.

Two former Flutterwave employees who spoke to TechCabal and asked not to be named view the deal as a defence against the high costs and failure rates associated with traditional card rails. 

While international card schemes like Visa and Mastercard dominate the global market, they often struggle with local relevance in Africa due to high intermediary fees and settlement delays that can stretch beyond 48 hours. Mono’s infrastructure facilitates direct account-to-account transfers that settle almost instantly on local rails. 

Card transactions typically involve multiple intermediaries, including acquirers, issuers and switches, each taking a portion of the transaction value. Flutterwave will use Mono’s open banking APIs to bypass these hurdles. 

Addressing trust gaps with data 

The move is a bet on the future of African finance, one where bank transfers and real-time data replace the high fees and failure rates of credit cards, according to Flutterwave CEO Olugbenga ‘GB’ Agboola.

“Payments, data, and trust cannot exist in silos,” Agboola said in a statement. Taking this approach simplifies typical compliance-heavy processes, such as bank verification and identity checks, which have historically been bottlenecks in onboarding SMEs at scale. 

At the time of the deal, Mono had enabled more than 8 million bank account linkages, reaching about 12% of Nigeria’s banked population. The resulting pool of roughly 100 billion data points has become collateral in a market where traditional credit bureaus capture only a thin slice of activity.

A stablecoin play 

The strategic roadmap for the combined entity includes open banking-enabled stablecoin use cases. Stablecoins have become key tools for African businesses seeking to hedge against local currency volatility and navigate the scarcity of American dollars. 

A 2025 report by Yellow Card, a pan-African crypto platform, disclosed that stablecoins made up 43% of all cryptocurrency transactions in Africa in 2024. Nigeria led with nearly $22 billion in transactions between July 2023 and June 2024. 

However, the liquidity of these stablecoins has been affected by cumbersome on-ramps and off-ramps. The integration of Mono’s APIs created a pathway for converting and settling digital assets directly into verified bank accounts. This is expected to streamline cross-border trade, mainly in corridors where the correspondent banking system is inefficient. 

The acquisition, a first in Africa in 2026, provides an interesting liquidity event and signals the sector’s maturation. Early backers of Mono, including General Catalyst and Tiger Global, saw a return of up to 20 times their investment.