Payment Failures Threaten Growing Trust in Fintech – Acting CEO, Belema
Quick Reads
- Speaking at the Nigerian Fintech Forum, Belema Fintech’s Acting MD/CEO Michael Adesola said Africa’s fintech sector must prioritize infrastructure resilience over user growth and transaction volume.
- Adesola identified transaction failures as one of the biggest threats to trust in digital payments, noting customers don’t care where in the chain a failure happens, they just see a broken promise.
- He urged fintechs and infrastructure providers to stress-test systems, build redundancy, and strengthen interoperability across Nigeria’s financial ecosystem.
- Belema Fintech is a CBN-licensed switching and processing institution offering instant transfers, card processing, online collections, and direct debit services.
Africa’s fintech boom will only be worth celebrating if the infrastructure behind it can hold up under pressure, according to Michael Adesola, Acting Managing Director/CEO of Belema Fintech.
Speaking at the Nigerian Fintech Forum, Adesola pushed back on the industry’s obsession with growth metrics, arguing that user numbers, transaction volumes, and slick digital products mean little if the systems processing those transactions cannot be trusted when it matters most. He framed the challenge facing Africa fintech growth in blunt terms: the continent isn’t short of fintech companies, it’s short of resilience.
“Africa doesn’t have a fintech shortage. What we may have is a resilience shortage. The real question is no longer how fast we can scale, but whether the infrastructure beneath that scale can be trusted when the pressure comes,” Adesola said.
He pointed to transaction failures as one of the clearest cracks in the system. A payment might show “successful” on a customer’s screen, he explained, while the person meant to receive the money is still waiting. Whether the failure happened at a bank, a processor, a switch, or a service provider doesn’t matter to the customer, all they see is a promise that didn’t hold.
That framing sits at the heart of the case Adesola is making for Africa fintech growth to be paired with stronger backend systems. He wants companies to stress-test their infrastructure before real-world pressure exposes the weak points, build redundancy into critical services, and improve interoperability across banks, processors, and fintech platforms. He also called for more collaboration among industry players, saying competition shouldn’t get in the way of protecting the stability of the wider financial system.
Adesola argued that the flashy, user-facing side of fintech, apps, dashboards, clean interfaces, can’t make up for weak infrastructure underneath. Payment rails, switching systems, identity verification, APIs, and cybersecurity, he said, are what actually determine whether a fintech app can deliver on what it promises.
“A beautiful interface cannot compensate for infrastructure that fails at the exact moment a customer needs it,” he said.
These are the same principles Belema Fintech, a Central Bank of Nigeria-licensed switching and processing institution, says it’s built its business around. The company provides instant transfer services, card payment processing, online collections, and direct debit infrastructure to banks, merchants, and fintechs across Nigeria, with products including Belema Pay and Belema Switching & Processing, plus a POS Agency Banking offering in the pipeline.
Adesola closed by redefining what winning should look like in Africa’s fintech space going forward. The companies that come out on top, he said, won’t necessarily be the ones with the biggest user base or the flashiest app, they’ll be the ones that consistently deliver on the basic promise of digital finance: that when a payment says it’s done, the money has actually moved.
