Fintech Startup, Ding, Targets Payment Bottlenecks Slowing Growth of Nigerian SMEs
Quick Reads
- Who: Deborah Onyibe, founder of fintech startup Ding!
- What: A new push to remove friction before the payment step, not just speed it up
- Why it matters: Nigerian SMEs still rely on manual, multi-step bank transfers that create drop-off and delay
- The pitch: A unified merchant payment identity that works across banks and fintech platforms
- The bigger bet: The next fintech winners won’t be the fastest movers of money, they’ll be the ones who make paying invisible
Nigeria’s fintech sector has spent over a decade racing to make digital payments faster and more accessible, a push that has turned hours-long transfers into seconds and pulled millions of previously unbanked Nigerians into the formal financial system. But according to Deborah Onyibe, founder of payments startup Ding!, speed was never the whole story.
Onyibe argues that the industry’s obsession with transaction speed has masked a subtler, more persistent problem: the clunky ritual that happens before money ever moves. A typical small-business transaction, she notes, still requires a customer to request account details, copy them into a banking app, confirm the recipient, complete the transfer, and then send proof of payment, a sequence so familiar that most people no longer register it as inconvenient.
Ding! is building infrastructure aimed at collapsing that ritual, letting merchants receive payments through a single, simplified identity that works across banks, fintech apps, and merchant platforms, rather than adding yet another destination to an already crowded payments landscape.
Onyibe’s approach draws on her background in brand strategy, including work on Payday’s growth past two million users and its Starlink-linked 2.0 relaunch. That experience, she says, taught her that customers rarely articulate friction in technical terms, they simply feel that something is inconvenient, and stop noticing why.
Her broader wager: just as contactless cards, QR payments, and one-click checkout eventually became invisible defaults, bank account numbers may be the next payment convention to fade into obsolescence, not because they stop working, but because “working” is no longer enough.
