What 17 years of survival taught Paga about building fintech in Africa

In a continent where fintech startups have burned through hundreds of millions of dollars chasing growth, Paga has done something rarer: it has simply lasted.

In a conversation with Samora Kariuki, founder of Frontier Fintech, Paga co-founder and CEO Tayo Oviosu laid out why, and his answers are poles apart from much of what the industry has spent the last decade believing.

The clearest example is Paga’s decision to stay out of the card-gateway war that produced Paystack and Flutterwave. “Strategy is largely about deciding what not to pursue,” Oviosu argued, explaining that Nigeria was never fundamentally a card-first market, and competing in an already crowded segment would have pulled Paga’s resources away from where it had a genuine edge.

Instead of fighting for space in card payments, Paga concentrated on alternative payment rails, a decision that looked unambitious at the time but kept the company out of a brutal, capital-intensive race it did not need to win.

That same discipline shaped how Paga approached its own ambitions. Oviosu’s central thesis is that financial inclusion at scale was never going to come from building “another bank.” His comparison is to Amazon Web Services, a company that won not by competing directly with the businesses it served, but by building the infrastructure layer underneath them.

This became what he calls the "Paga Engine" thesis: rather than remaining purely consumer-facing, Paga evolved into infrastructure, providing the backend systems that let banks, wallets, retailers, and other businesses embed financial services into their own platforms.

He also pushed back on a common industry assumption that agent banking in Nigeria is a maturing, near-saturated business. Oviosu sees it differently. “Agent banking is a 20-year business,” he said, pointing to the fact that approximately 80% of transactions conducted through agents are still cash withdrawals.

Despite years of digitisation efforts across the country, cash remains deeply embedded in everyday Nigerian commerce, and that reality means agent networks are not going away anytime soon.

Oviosu explains why Paga chose profit over growth

Perhaps his sharpest and most quotable position was on what actually keeps a fintech company alive. “Revenue is a vanity metric,” Oviosu said. “Gross profit is what keeps businesses alive.” It is a direct rebuke of the growth-at-all-costs mentality that defined much of the fintech funding boom, companies posting impressive top-line numbers while quietly destroying value through weak unit economics.

He cited competitors that distributed POS terminals at little or no cost to chase rapid customer acquisition, noting that while he could not speak to the exact economics behind those models, Paga deliberately chose a different path, prioritising healthy margins and cash-flow sustainability over headline growth figures.

That philosophy extended to how Paga thinks about rivals. Rather than treating companies like OPay and PalmPay purely as competitors, Oviosu said Paga is increasingly pursuing collaboration and integration across the ecosystem, a natural extension of being an infrastructure layer meant to empower the broader financial system rather than dominate the consumer market outright.

On technology, Oviosu pointed to AI as a genuine productivity multiplier rather than a workforce replacement. Paga adopted Claude Code to accelerate internal development, building an automated reconciliation tool that cut a process which previously took three hours down to twelve seconds.

For him, the value of AI lies in freeing employees from repetitive work so they can focus on judgment and decision-making, augmentation, not substitution.

Beyond payments, Oviosu’s thinking extends into retail through Doroki, a platform built on the idea that merchants need to be digitised operationally before they can be offered increasingly sophisticated financial products.

Once a retailer has structured digital records of their business, lending and other financial services become far easier to extend responsibly.

What ties all of this together is a single, unfashionable idea: that enduring businesses are built through discipline and infrastructure, not trend-chasing and capital burn.

As Africa’s fintech industry shifts from a decade defined by aggressive growth to one increasingly focused on sustainability and profitability, Paga’s seventeen-year bet on patience is starting to look less like caution and more like foresight.

Similar read: Paga founder Tayo Oviosu steps back from day-to-day operations as company turns 17 and enters new growth phase