Hi Fintech friends 👋, 

Here are the highlights of what happened in African Fintech this week;

• A Nigerian fintech startup processed $150 billion in 2023.
• Y Combinator added a banking-as-a-service African startup to its portfolio.
• An African VC ran a "stay default alive" masterclass for its portfolio.
• A Buy Now Pay Later African startup pivoted its business model to focus on cross-border payments.
• A fintech startup shut down despite having one year of runway.
• Opportunity to work at one of four amazing African fintech companies.

💸 Fundraise and Exits

• Miden raised $500K from Y-Combinator for it’s Banking as a Service to enable African companies build and launch financial products such as virtual card programs, credit systems, reconciliation, and expense management systems.

💰 Venture Funds

• Here are the key insights African VC Ventures Platform shared with it’s portfolio companies.

🚀 Partnerships & Product Launches

• Interswitch and OPay partnered for secure payments, following reported fraud cases.

• Visa and Pesaflow partnered to improve digital payments in Kenya.

• Zilla discontinued its buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) service to focus on Zillawire, it‘s newly launched cross-border payment.

• Raise launched an AI powered tool to Clean up cap tables and corporate structures for African startups.
• Honeycoin launched the “everything app” for users anywhere in the world.

📰 News of the Week

Moniepoint (previously TeamApt) processed more than 5 billion transactions worth over $150 Billion in 2023 .

In 2023, Moniepoint(previously TeamApt) one of Nigeria's largest payments startups, processed an impressive 5.2 billion transactions (~433 million transactions monthly) worth over $150 Billion. It represents a 205% increase from 2022, when the startup processed 1.7 billion transactions worth over $100 billion.

Moniepoint currently boasts over 2 million business accounts and 800,000 active POS terminals used daily nationwide. Its business clientele spans various sectors, with the majority coming from retail (38.29%), followed by food and drinks (17.77%), oil and gas (9.11%), IT and electronics (6.12%), beauty and personal care (4.5%), and agriculture (4%).

📑 Read of the week

• Fintech and energy illuminate DR Congo’s nascent startup ecosystem.  (Techcabal)
• Global interest, local impact: Seedstar’s Cyrine Ben Fadhel's outlook for African VC. (Benjamindada)

📖 Other News, Reads, and Media

• Nigerian fintech startup, Cova shut down after two years.

• Access HoldCo finalized stages of regulatory approval to acquire ARM Pensions.

• Livestock Wealth’s lead investor stated that it did the requisite due diligence before investing $530,000) into the company.
• Nigerian Banks and fintech joined forces to tackle soaring fraud.
• OPay planned to enforce KYC requirements in March 2024 to prevent fraud and impersonation.

• M-PESA faced another outage in January for undisclosed reasons.

🎥 VIDEO INTERVIEWS/DISCUSSIONS

In Conversation with Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede who is one of the most successful and esteemed businesspeople on the continent. In 2002, he led the acquisition of Access Bank, which under his 11-year leadership grew into the largest bank in Nigeria and one of the largest in Africa.

🦉 Tweet of the Week

🎯 Fintech Opportunities

• FairMoney is hiring for Vertical Lead - Merchant Acquiring .
• Yassir is hiring for Product Manager(Financial Services)
• Flutterwave is hiring for Product Manager, SMB
• M-Kopa is hiring for Product Manager - Portfolio Management.

Made in Tanzania 🇹🇿 with 💚

👍🏽👎🏽  Did you enjoy this edition of This Week In Fintech Africa? Please share your feedback with me on Twitter or LinkedIn .