By Austin Okpagu, Nigeria Country Director, Verto
The recent visit of the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, to Lagos marked a renewed commitment to deepening the tech and trade relationship between the UK and Nigeria. As the Mayor noted during the visit, Lagos is one of the fastest-growing tech clusters in the world, while London remains Europe’s largest tech ecosystem, serving as a global centre for capital, regulation, and financial services. Tapping into this dual strength can unlock real potential for African startups to scale, not just regionally, but globally.
Fintech is at the Heart of Trade and Investment
At the heart of this opportunity lies the fintech sector, which plays a pivotal role in simplifying the flow of trade, investment, and everyday business operations. From modernising payments infrastructure and streamlining customer onboarding to ensuring regulatory compliance and easing foreign exchange challenges, fintechs are helping to remove long-standing friction in how capital moves in and out of African markets.
Yet cross-border payments within Africa, to a large extent remain slow and expensive, frequently dependent on intermediaries and hard-currency such as USD. This creates added friction in a region where rapid, cost-effective financial flows are key to economic progress.
The trade mission directly addressed these barriers, with the mayor promising to address some of them, by working with the UK government, to ease payment transactions between Nigeria and the UK. However, there’s still a big responsibility on fintech innovators and startups to not only build up the payment infrastructure here, but to continue to innovate, scale and keep up with technological trends and global standards.
Fintech 2.0: What the Next Phase Demands
We are now entering what many refer to as the era of Fintech 2.0, a phase that is both about digitising legacy systems, and building entirely new financial infrastructure that is accessible, interoperable, and fit for modern trade. This is especially critical for intra-African commerce under frameworks like AfCFTA, which require real-time settlements, local currency support, and interoperability across national borders. Lagos, which is home to over 500 active fintech startups, has the scale and depth to lead this transformation.
Matching ambition with strategy
It’s essential for fintechs to stay ahead by embedding compliance into their product from the start. Achieving product-market fit remains critical, as startups must remain nimble and responsive to their customers’ needs. Fintechs in Nigeria and across Africa must focus on designing an infrastructure that enables seamless movement of money across borders, support multiple currencies, and adhere to dynamic, local regulatory frameworks.
Emerging tools such as stablecoins, regional payment rails like Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), and open banking APIs are expanding what’s possible. Beyond Africa, closer ties with UK regulators could pave the way for more harmonised standards across markets, accelerating scale and trust. And crucially, we must work toward reducing the need for pre-trade currency conversions altogether. When businesses are forced to route payments through multiple intermediaries or convert into third-party currencies, it adds layers of cost, delay, and inefficiency. A more direct, transparent flow of local currencies is essential for enabling seamless trade across African markets.
Some Fintechs like ours, Verto, are already championing this, enabling cross border trading with exotic local currencies like naira, cedis, shillings, and more. This helps African businesses operate with greater efficiency and sovereignty.
Today, Fintech 2.0 is no longer a distant ambition, but unlocking its full potential will require a sharper focus on pan-African scalability. The opportunity goes beyond connecting Nigeria and the rest of Africa to the UK, it’s also in connecting African markets to one another. Achieving this will mean that startups in the country and the rest of Africa must be able to operate seamlessly across borders, from Ghana to Kenya, from South Africa to Egypt, Nigeria to Senegal, and so on, while maintaining strong global linkages.
