Having processed more than 630 million individual transactions totaling over $31 billion since its founding in 2016, the African e-payments startup Flutterwave has made a habit of success. Flutterwave is on a steady climb to becoming a major player in worldwide finance.
Flutterwave’s path to global prominence contains valuable lessons for nascent companies, entrepreneurs, and anyone interested in learning how a small fintech company became one of Africa’s most valuable startups.
Step One: Identify a Problem
These days, there is a tendency to put the cart before the horse. College students major in entrepreneurship, preparing to guide a company — any kind of company — from an idea to a publicly owned multinational enterprise. But ideas are easy; execution is not. The truth is that very few of the biggest trailblazers in the corporate world, the kind of people who have changed the world through their business, set out to become entrepreneurs.
Many of them simply identified a problem, then found a way to solve it. Steve Jobs was an English major. Bill Gates studied mathematics and computers. Elon Musk double-majored in physics and economics.
For Flutterwave CEO and founder Olugbenga “GB” Agboola, the goal was never to create Africa’s most-valuable tech startup. That was simply a byproduct. His goal was to build a solution that helped Africa. And he found it in helping multinational corporations navigate the complex payment environment of Africa.
“There are so many problems to solve on the continent,” he said. “There are so many things to build. I’m excited by entrepreneurs who are willing to take on these crazy problems and try to solve them, across the board.”
Step Two: Find Partners
The old saying says that if you want to go quickly, go alone, but if you want to go far, go with others. For Flutterwave, that certainty rings true.
Agboola started Flutterwave after working at a bank in Nigeria. He noticed that his clients faced problems when they tried to move money across national borders in Africa. For example, if a company headquartered in one country was building a new office in another country, they faced delays when sending money to pay builders or buy materials. This happened even when the same bank existed in both locations.
Agboola realized that these slowdowns hurt the African economy. They were inefficient. The complexities of financial regulations in Africa made business drag and cost corporations extra money.
Having worked at Google Wallet and PayPal, Agboola knew things could be faster, so he created a company that would solve those problems. Flutterwave began life as a startup that would swiftly manage money transfers between countries, allowing work to happen more efficiently.
The idea was great, but the company’s success was sped along by the success it had with its early — and prominent — partners.
“I would say the way we look at things like risk at Flutterwave, we look at them as opportunities,” Agboola said. “If you come into Africa, Africa has over 50 countries and each of these countries has its own regulatory guidelines, right? And what this means is that if you have to operate in these countries, you have to do 50-something different registrations and regulatory processes. And while that is a challenge, a major challenge, we also see it as an opportunity because we’ve helped a couple of our biggest customers, including customers like Uber, to expand within Africa in a faster way than they would’ve done that on their own simply by knowing the terrain and doing what we are supposed to do.”
Step Three: Stick to a Purpose
As more companies realized the benefits that Flutterwave brought to their ability to expand in Africa, the startup’s e-payments platform was in demand. It was clear the businesses needed to grow — but how?
This is a question that plagues many successful startups. Creating a successful product out of an idea is hard enough, but scaling intelligently is a completely different kind of challenge.
Luckily, Agboola had long ago foreseen the possibilities of his company. When he first began Flutterwave, he articulated a vision for the platform: to connect all of Africa together, and to connect Africa to the wider world.
“When we were starting Flutterwave, a major core thesis has always been about making Africa feel like a country. It’s not a country, but let’s make it feel like one,” he said. “And we invested a lot in that philosophy, because we believe so much in the fact that payments should be simple in Africa. Payments are extremely broken in Africa, but they can be simple in Africa. And that obviously meant a lot of expansion that people did not even imagine possible.”
Step Four: Grin and Bear it
Building an infrastructure to support transactions across the African continent was no small feat. And, while the company has enjoyed tremendous success, it hasn’t always been easy.
“It’s been hard, speaking very frankly. It’s been really hard. When you attempt to build payments infrastructure across 30 countries … 30 different central bank licenses to apply for, 30 different requirements of compliance to adhere to,” he said. “We’re one of the most complex companies in Africa today because … we have a board in every country. A board in Nigeria, a board in most markets, a board globally as well, regulatory requirements to fulfill across the board.”
Every new market presented a new problem. Agboola and his team needed to stay resilient in the face of new challenges, which wasn’t easy. But they kept their focus on his founding vision, which guided them through trying times.
“Following your customer’s path is very important,” he said. “Ensuring that you build the required resilience to go through with that objective is even more important, because you get obstacles … But I think we’re actually the only company in Africa that has navigated Africa licensing like what we’ve done, to be able to do it at that scale and get it done properly as well.”
Step Five: Focus on the Long Game
Everyone wants to grow quickly. But it’s often better to focus on growing smartly.
“We’re here for the long term as a company,” Agboola said. “We want to be here for a long time. We want to be the story of a company that started from zero and became something in Africa. That’s our story. We started from zero, and we’ve had to restart from zero, but what is important here is that we’re still here, and we’re thriving.”
And, so far, it seems to be working.