How Bank-Owned Fintechs Are Quietly Reshaping Africa’s Financial LandscapeÂ
A Nigerian bank’s payment unit just tripled its transaction volume in a single year, from roughly $18 billion to $54 billion. No fanfare. No unicorn headline. Just a quiet number buried inside a bigger institution’s balance sheet.
That unit is HabariPay, GTBank’s payments arm. And according to a growing chorus of analysts and investors, it’s a sign of something bigger: some of Africa’s most valuable fintech businesses aren’t being built in garages or startup incubators. They’re already alive, fully grown, and hiding inside the banks people walk into every day to withdraw cash.
The Billion-Dollar Businesses Hiding in Plain Sight
For years, the story of African fintech has had familiar heroes. Flutterwave. Moniepoint. Wave. Each one built a payments empire from nothing and was rewarded with a billion-dollar valuation and global headlines.
But a quieter story has been forming behind those names. A growing number of analysts and investors believe some of Africa’s biggest future fintech deals could come not from new startups, but from banks separating their payments businesses into standalone companies, unlocking value that has long been hidden inside larger banking groups.
The logic is almost embarrassingly simple once you see it. Payments businesses are often valued differently from banks because investors see them as technology-driven growth companies rather than traditional financial institutions. Once separated from their parent banks, these units can attract external investors, secure higher valuations, and potentially pursue listings or acquisitions.
In other words: the same business, wearing a different label, can be worth far more.
Why a Bank’s Payments Arm Gets Underpriced
Here’s the part that should bother every bank shareholder in Africa. Unlike Flutterwave or Moniepoint, a bank’s payments operation remains embedded within the broader banking group, making it harder for investors to assign a standalone valuation. Analysts call this a valuation gap.
Startups get judged on growth potential and where they’re headed. Bank-owned payments units get lumped into the bank’s overall numbers and judged on where the whole institution stands today, capital adequacy, loan books, regulatory weight, all of it. As a result, large payments franchises can remain underappreciated despite handling transaction volumes that rival or exceed some of Africa’s most celebrated fintech companies.
This isn’t a theoretical gap. One analysis estimates that Ecobank’s payments business alone could be worth roughly $3 billion if it were spun out and priced the way the market prices Flutterwave or Moniepoint, bigger in transaction volume than Flutterwave and Moniepoint combined, yet valued as just another line item inside a 33-country banking group.
What This Means for the Person Paying Cash for Bread
It’s easy to read this as a story for bankers and venture capitalists. It isn’t, not really.
Tayo Oviosu, founder of Nigerian payments platform Paga, put his finger on why this matters to ordinary people: “The average Nigerian is still paying bills in cash. There are still massive opportunities ahead of us.”
That single line is the whole argument in miniature. Every bank-owned payments unit that gets spun out, capitalised, and pushed to compete harder is, in theory, one more player racing to pull everyday transactions out of cash and into something faster, cheaper, and traceable, paying a market trader, sending money to a sibling in another city, paying a school fee without standing in a queue. The valuation gap isn’t just an investor’s puzzle. It’s also a measure of how much friction is still left in ordinary financial life across the continent.
A Trend Already in Motion
This isn’t a hypothetical. Africa’s fintech sector has already shifted from growth-at-all-costs to consolidation, and bank-linked plays are part of that wave. Flutterwave’s acquisition of open banking startup Mono, Paystack’s purchase of a Nigerian microfinance bank, and Moniepoint’s move into business software all point in the same direction: control of infrastructure, not just transaction fees, is now the prize.
If a bank-owned unit like HabariPay can grow transaction volume threefold in a year while still tucked inside a traditional balance sheet, the question isn’t whether these units deserve their own valuation. It’s how long banks can afford to keep them buried.
Banks sitting on these units have a choice: spin them out and let the market price them properly, or keep quietly under-monetising one of their most valuable assets while smaller, scrappier startups absorb the credit, and the capital, for solving Africa’s payments problem. Glostarep’s view: the banks that move first on this won’t just unlock shareholder value. They’ll set the terms for the next phase of African fintech consolidation, before someone else does it for them.
So here’s the question worth sitting with: if your own bank is sitting on a hidden fintech giant, would you even know, and should that change how you bank tomorrow?
