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Flutterwave Inc. is betting its purchase of open-banking platform Mono Technologies Nigeria Ltd. will boost earnings and strengthen the case for a potential initial public offering by Africa’s most valuable financial-technology unicorn, its chief executive said.
In a significant opening move for 2026, Flutterwave acquired the open-banking startup Mono in an all-stock deal valued between $25 million and $40 million.
This acquisition is widely viewed by market analysts as a strategic “moat-building” exercise. By bringing Mono’s “Plaid-like” infrastructure in-house, Flutterwave is moving beyond being a simple payment gateway to becoming a full-stack financial data and infrastructure giant—a critical requirement for its long-anticipated dual listing on the NASDAQ and NGX.
“Right now, our focus is profitability, resilience and better infrastructure, and that is why we acquired Mono,” Olugbenga Agboola, Flutterwave CEO said in an interview. “It makes us a better candidate for everything,” including the planned IPO, he said.
Since its founding in 2016, Flutterwave has expanded to about 35 African countries, accepts payments in more than 30 currencies and processes about 500,000 payments daily, according to its website. It has also held various funding rounds, with one in January 2022 that tripled the company’s valuation to $3 billion.
To justify its $3 billion valuation in the public markets, Flutterwave must prove it can generate sustainable margins and own the “trust layer” of African finance.
Owning Mono allows Flutterwave to bypass expensive international card rails (Visa/Mastercard) in favor of Account-to-Account (A2A) payments. This improves profit margins—a metric the company’s CFO, Mitesh Popat, has been focused on throughout 2025.
Mono provides access to over 100 billion financial data points from 8 million linked accounts. In a continent where credit bureaus are often thin, this data is “gold” for the lending and verification services that public investors value.
Africa’s largest payments startup first announced plans for an offering on New York’s Nasdaq stock exchange in 2022 but delayed them to address issues including high-level staff departures, allegations of financial impropriety and personnel harassment in some of its offices.
It later halted the plan entirely, citing the need to first build profitable and sustainable business. The company also denied the accusations of financial misconduct.
Flutterwave previously paid Mono per transaction for account-to-account payments on its platform. The purchase will lower costs, expanding its profit margin on these particular processes to at least 10%, Agboola said.
By integrating Mono’s identity verification APIs natively, Flutterwave can significantly lower the fraud and chargeback rates that have historically dogged its reputation and stalled previous IPO attempts.
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