Flutterwave has focused on helping African businesses accept and move money across borders, largely by connecting card networks with local payment processors. With its acquisition of open-banking startup Mono, the company is taking a deeper step towards owning the financial data layer behind those payments.
The all-stock deal, valued between $25 million and $40 million, marks a major consolidation play in Africa’s financial infrastructure. It comes at a time when the continent’s digital economy is gradually shifting away from traditional card payments toward bank-linked, account-to-account systems.
Mono will continue to operate as an independent unit, with CEO Abdulhamid Hassan retaining control of day-to-day operations. The company will keep its technical autonomy while gaining access to Flutterwave’s licences and reach across more than 30 countries. Flutterwave has not disclosed whether the deal will affect Mono’s staff.
Before the acquisition, Mono had raised $17.5 million from investors including Tiger Global and Target Catalyst. Despite becoming a leading open-banking platform, the company operated in a challenging environment defined by fragmented banking systems and regulatory frameworks that often lagged behind innovation. Joining Flutterwave gives Mono a faster path to scale without the friction of expanding independently across multiple markets.
For Flutterwave, the logic is strategic. Controlling financial data allows the company to move beyond payments into services such as credit, identity verification, and deeper account-to-account transfers. It also strengthens Flutterwave’s core infrastructure at a time when card payments in Africa remain costly and unreliable.
Globally, similar strategies have paid off. In 2020, Mastercard acquired open-banking firm Finicity for $825 million, enabling it to expand into lending, risk scoring, identity verification, and real-time bank payments. Flutterwave’s Mono deal follows a comparable infrastructure-first approach, adapted to Africa’s realities.
The acquisition effectively brings together the data and settlement layers of the payments stack. Flutterwave is evolving from a payment gateway into a full-stack financial infrastructure provider, combining Mono’s APIs for financial data access, identity checks, and bank transfers into a single platform.
One of the biggest advantages is bypassing traditional card rails. Card transactions rely on multiple intermediaries each taking fees and increasing the chances of failure or delays. In contrast, Mono’s open-banking infrastructure enables direct bank-to-bank transfers that settle faster and cost less, using local payment rails.
Flutterwave CEO Olugbenga “GB” Agboola has described the deal as a bet on a future where payments, data, and trust are tightly connected. Access to real-time financial data simplifies compliance-heavy processes like bank verification and identity checks, longstanding bottlenecks for onboarding African SMEs at scale.
At the time of the acquisition, Mono had enabled over 8 million bank account connections, covering about 12% of Nigeria’s banked population. That activity generated close to 100 billion data points far more granular than what traditional credit bureaus capture creating a valuable foundation for lending, risk assessment, and financial inclusion.
The deal also opens the door to stablecoin-enabled payments. Stablecoins have become a key tool for African businesses managing currency volatility and dollar shortages. In 2024, they accounted for 43% of all cryptocurrency transactions in Africa, with Nigeria alone recording nearly $22 billion in stablecoin activity over a 12-month period.
However, poor on-ramps and off-ramps have limited their usefulness. By integrating Mono’s banking APIs, Flutterwave can enable direct conversion and settlement of digital assets into verified bank accounts, improving cross-border trade, especially in markets where correspondent banking is slow or expensive.
As one of Africa’s first major infrastructure-led acquisitions, the Mono deal signals a maturing ecosystem. Early investors reportedly saw returns of up to 20 times their investment. More importantly, it highlights a shift in strategy: the future of African fintech may be less about flashy apps and more about who controls the rails, data, and trust that power the system underneath.