The Head of SME Business at Flutterwave, Bolanle Baruwa, has praised the growth of Africa’s fintech ecosystem, stating that the continent’s payment infrastructure is now at par with the world’s during high-profile appearances at the NYSE Tech Summit in San Francisco and the Africa Fintech Summit in Washington, D.C. She noted that small and micro enterprises (SMEs), which dominate Africa’s economy, stand to gain the most from this development.
During the NYSE Tech Summit, Baruwa participated in a fireside chat titled: “Building Global Payment Rails for the Next Billion.” She addressed the persistent friction points for enterprises moving money internationally, such as slow settlement, FX liquidity constraints, and the complexity of navigating compliance across multiple African markets.
She highlighted Flutterwave’s role as an infrastructure layer enabling multinationals and African enterprises to navigate these challenges on a single platform in over 34 countries. She also addressed the strategic positioning of stablecoins as infrastructure, not a niche crypto tool, for markets where correspondent banking remains costly and slow.
Commenting on these developments, she said: “For a business in Lagos or Nairobi, enterprise-grade infrastructure is not a luxury; it is survival. It means not losing a day’s revenue to a settlement delay or watching a cross-border payment fail because of fragmented rails.”
At the Africa Fintech Summit (AFTS) in Washington DC, Baruwa delivered a keynote speech on behalf of Flutterwave Founder and CEO, Olugbenga ‘GB’ Agboola. In the speech, she traced Flutterwave’s decade-long evolution from a payment gateway connecting fragmented financial systems to a financial operating system for Africa.
She emphasized that milestones like acquiring Mono, an open banking platform, and securing a microfinance banking license in Nigeria, enable Flutterwave to manage payments, banking, data, and identity through a single, unified stack. “The roads are paved. The Superhighway is open. Africa’s payment systems are no longer catching up with the world; they are setting the pace,” Baruwa noted.
Speaking on the panel “The Signal from Rwanda: Perspective from Fintech Operators,” at AFTS, Bolanle championed regional license passporting initiatives such as the Rwanda-Ghana and Rwanda-Kenya license passporting initiatives as a model for reducing regulatory fragmentation continent-wide. For an infrastructure provider operating at scale, she argued that the administrative cost of siloed jurisdictions remains a primary barrier to continental growth.
Baruwa also highlighted the company’s broader commitment to SMEs, removing backend complexities and allowing businesses in Lagos or Accra, or Nairobi, to accept payments from customers in international hubs like Washington, D.C., as seamlessly as a local transaction.
She also shared the cross-border capabilities of Send App by Flutterwave, which is now evolving from a remittance platform into a full consumer banking experience with dedicated account numbers, stablecoin wallets, and travel cards. This marks Flutterwave’s definitive evolution into a true multi-rail financial operating system, designed to handle fiat rails and regulated stablecoins with equal efficiency for the next decade of African commerce.
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