When Nigerian fintech Nomba launched in 2016, it was not trying to build financial infrastructure for businesses. The company started as Kudi, a chatbot that allowed users to carry out simple financial tasks like transfers, bill payments, and airtime purchases through messaging platforms.
But founders Yinka Adewale and Pelumi Aboluwarin soon realised that the real opportunity lay in serving businesses. Over time, the company evolved from a simple chatbot into a payments platform serving merchants and eventually rebranded to Nomba in 2022.
Today, Nomba provides tools that allow businesses to accept payments, manage money, and run financial operations across digital and physical channels. The company serves hundreds of thousands of merchants and processes billions of dollars in transaction volume annually.
From agency banking to business infrastructure
Nomba’s early growth came through Nigeria’s agency banking model, in which individuals and small businesses operate as agents, offering financial services such as cash withdrawals, transfers, and bill payments via POS terminals.
That model allowed the startup to tap into Nigeria’s massive cash economy and reach millions of people who were either underbanked or completely outside the formal financial system.
But over time, the company shifted its attention toward merchants themselves. Today, Nomba offers POS terminals, payment gateways, business accounts, treasury tools, payroll services, and operational software designed to help businesses manage their finances in one place.
While Nigeria remains its largest market, Nomba has increasingly looked beyond the country for growth opportunities.
In 2025, the company began expanding into the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Africa’s fourth-most-populous country. Instead of launching with a full banking suite, Nomba chose remittances as its entry point.
By building a network of physical agents across Kinshasa and other cities, the fintech aims to handle inflows from major trading corridors, such as China and Dubai, before layering additional financial products over time.
Victoria Fakiya – Senior Writer
Techpoint Digest
Stop struggling to find your tech career path
Discover in-demand tech skills and build a standout portfolio in this FREE 5-day email course
But the long-term goal is bigger than remittances. If successful, the DRC expansion could serve as a gateway for Nomba into Central Africa, where large populations remain outside the formal banking system.
Building cross-border payment rails
Another piece of Nomba’s strategy involves helping African businesses get paid internationally, a major bottleneck as more merchants look beyond the continent for revenue. Many businesses on the continent struggle to collect payments from overseas customers due to expensive card processing fees and fragmented payment systems.
Earlier this year, Nomba acquired a licensed Canadian payment service provider, giving it the regulatory infrastructure to move money locally within Canada while connecting Canadian dollar flows directly to African markets.
The company plans to invest additional capital into the acquired entity to scale cross-border payment infrastructure between the two regions. The acquisition also allows Nomba to serve African businesses trading with Canada while reducing the friction and cost typically associated with international payments.
Its most recent move is a partnership with UK-based financial services company Volume, to enable Nigerian merchants to receive payments directly into their bank accounts through open banking rails.
Traditionally, African businesses accepting international payments have relied heavily on card networks, which can cost merchants between 6% and 7% in processing fees. Account-to-account payments bypass those card networks entirely, allowing customers to pay directly from their bank accounts while reducing transaction costs for businesses.
For merchants selling internationally, the impact can be significant. One early adopter of the integration, reportedly received over £5,000 from UK customers within two months of using the system.
For Adewale, the vision is to make global transactions feel local for African businesses.
“The broader vision is making international transactions feel local on both ends, whether through open banking rails, stablecoins, or other infrastructure,” he says.
That ambition taps into a shift happening across Africa’s economy. More small and medium-sized businesses are participating in global trade, selling products online, offering services internationally, or working with overseas clients, but the financial systems supporting them have not kept up. Platforms like Nomba are trying to close that gap.
“The goal is simple; if you’re an African business selling globally, getting paid should feel no different from a local transaction,” Adewale maintains.
Nomba’s push into the UK payments corridor is partly driven by economic realities. The United Kingdom hosts one of the largest Nigerian diaspora populations, estimated at over 270,000 people, with migration rising in recent years. This diaspora drives a steady flow of money between both countries, primarily through remittances.
Trade links are also deepening. In December 2025 alone, trade between Nigeria and the UK reached £95.7 million, covering eCommerce purchases, subscriptions, professional services, and remittances. For fintech companies like Nomba, this activity represents a potentially large and growing market.
However, the strategy isn’t foolproof. Much of the UK–Nigeria payment corridor is already dominated by established financial services players, which handle cross-border card payments and merchant services. Additionally, most business financial flows between the two countries are still driven by businesses in the energy sector rather than exports from small African businesses.
That raises questions about whether infrastructure designed to help African companies bank globally can scale quickly enough to justify the investment.
Still, Nomba appears to be betting that the growing diaspora economy and expanding digital commerce between Lagos and London will create enough demand to make the corridor strategically important for African fintech infrastructure.
“Energy exports are a significant part of the Nigeria/UK trade relationship but they represent one dimension of a much broader economic corridor,” Adewale argues, noting that Nigerians in the UK continue to buy products from merchants in Nigeria who lose approximately 7% of the value of each transaction to fix conversion and card processing fees.
