Nigeria’s largest payments technology company, Flutterwave, has completed the acquisition of open banking startup Mono in an all-stock transaction valued at between $25 million and $40 million, marking one of the rare notable exits in Africa’s fintech ecosystem. The move expands Flutterwave’s footprint beyond traditional payment processing into the open banking layer of financial infrastructure, integrating data access, identity verification and account-to-account services into its broader platform.
Mono, often described as the “Plaid for Africa”, provides application programming interfaces that enable authorised access to users’ bank data, account verification and direct payment initiation, capabilities that are increasingly important for lenders, fintechs and digital platforms operating across the continent’s fragmented markets. Founded in 2019 and backed by investors including Tiger Global and General Catalyst, the startup has powered millions of bank account linkages and has become core infrastructure for digital lending and financial services in Nigeria.
Under the terms of the deal, Mono will continue to operate as an independent product while its technology becomes integrated within Flutterwave’s stack, allowing the combined entity to offer a unified suite of services that spans onboarding, payments, risk assessment and data-driven financial products. For Flutterwave, this vertical integration strengthens its position in a competitive landscape that demands not just payments volume but deeper engagement with financial data and trust-based services.
The acquisition also represents a liquidity event for early investors in Mono, at a time when meaningful exits remain scarce for African startups. Some backers are reported to have recouped their capital with significant multiples, an uncommon outcome in a market where funding conditions have tightened and follow-on financing rounds have been harder to secure.
