On January 5, 2026, Flutterwave, Africa’s largest fintech company, announced its acquisition of Mono, one of Nigeria’s biggest open banking startups, in a deal valued between $25 and 40 million.
Buried beneath the press releases lies a more consequential reality: one of Africa’s largest payment processors now controls the API rails that rival fintechs depend on to function.
Mono CEO Abdulhamid Hassan claims that nearly all Nigerian digital lenders rely on the company’s infrastructure to assess creditworthiness and initiate bank payments.
Mono further claims to have powered more than 8 million bank account linkages, covering roughly 12% of Nigeria’s banked population. It also claims to have delivered 100 billion financial data points to lending companies and processed millions in direct bank payments.
Customers include Visa-backed Moniepoint and GIC-backed PalmPay. Both companies offer lending products that would require the credit-scoring and account-verification APIs Mono provides, though the extent of their dependency on Mono’s infrastructure versus alternative solutions remains unclear.
The deal was framed as a straightforward infrastructure play, and Flutterwave says Mono will “continue to operate independently, with no changes to its leadership structure, team, or day-to-day operations.”
The reality is that Mono customers, which also included rival fintechs, are now all building on infrastructure owned by Flutterwave.
The API infrastructure landscape
Open Banking is a system that allows secure, consent-based sharing of financial data (such as account balances and transactions) with authorised third-party providers (Fintechs, other banks) via APIs.
Open banking APIs are the plumbing of digital finance: instead of every fintech drilling its own pipe into each bank, companies like Mono provide shared pipes that carry data and payments between dozens of banks and hundreds of apps.
Mono “connects to over 50 banks” and lets businesses “access aggregated customer‑permissioned financial data, facilitate payments, and verify identity and account ownership,” which is why so many lenders and payment apps sit on top of it.
Mono isn’t the only player in town, though. Another key player was Okra, a pioneering Nigerian open‑banking API startup that raised about $16.5 million but decided to wind down operations in May 2025, returning $4-5.5 million to investors, reducing competition among Nigerian open‑banking/API providers and strengthening Mono and similar companies’ grip.
Another player worth mentioning in the ecosystem is OnePipe, a Nigerian embedded‑finance startup that “aggregates APIs from banks and fintechs” and raised a 3.5 million dollar seed round to help banks digitise and partner with fintechs, though it is worth mentioning that OnePipe is closer to a banking-as-a-service/embedded finance platform than a strict “open banking” data aggregator like Mono.
As founder Ope Adeoye puts it, OnePipe “aggregates its APIs via partnerships with direct bank APIs and third‑party APIs like Mono,” indicating that even some OnePipe‑powered products ultimately sit on top of Mono’s rails.
If that architecture remains in place after the acquisition, even OnePipe may, at the
margins, depend on infrastructure now owned by Flutterwave.
For fintechs in Nigeria competing with Flutterwave, choosing an Open Banking API provider may now mean an uncomfortable trade‑off: integrate with the market leader, which is also your biggest competitor, or bet on smaller players with thinner coverage and more brittle uptime.
Mono powers data sharing, account verification, and bank payments; every identity
check, balance, lookup, or payment is a potential billable event.
Switching providers means re‑integrating these flows across KYC, data, and payments, which developers and founders routinely describe as months of work in embedded‑finance contexts.
Thus, Mono’s business is one in which switching providers is costly, creating long-term lock-in for already existing customers.
The Visa-Plaid shadow
In January 2020, Visa agreed to buy Plaid, a data aggregator and Open banking platform, whose APIs link apps like Venmo, Chime, and Wise to users’ bank accounts, for $5.3 billion.
Later that year, in November 2020, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) sued to block the purchase, forcing both parties to mutually terminate the merger agreement before the trial.
Visa argued Plaid was complementary, not competitive, emphasising that Plaid’s data pipes would help Visa support innovation for developers, financial institutions, and consumers, but the DOJ was not having it; they argued that “the merger would extinguish a nascent competitor, further entrench Visa’s dominance in the online debit market, and harm consumers.” Indicating that the move was for consumer protection.
The DOJ had just created a dedicated fintech unit within its antitrust division, signalling more aggressive oversight of payments and data-aggregation deals going forward. In its complaint, DOJ pointed to Visa CEO Al Kelly’s internal characterisation of the acquisition as an “insurance policy” to neutralise “a threat to our important US debit business” as evidence of anti-competitive intent.
By targeting an infrastructure player like Plaid, the DOJ signalled that control over consumer financial data pipelines is a competition issue, not just a privacy or security concern. The case injected new uncertainty into the playbook of incumbents seeking to buy rather than build in responding to fintech threats.
The Visa–Plaid breakup marked one of the clearest statements yet that US antitrust enforcers will move to protect potential future competitors, not just current rivals, in the digital payments market.
By contrast, Nigeria only finalised its open‑banking Operational Guidelines in 2023, focusing on consent, licensing, and security, but saying little about what happens when a core infrastructure provider is bought by a dominant player or shuts down.
There are no explicit, Plaid‑style safeguards governing infrastructure monopolies or mandatory data‑handover protocols in M&A scenarios, leaving gaps that Flutterwave–Mono now exposes. U.S. regulators blocked Visa–Plaid for precisely the reasons African fintechs should worry about Flutterwave–Mono: when a dominant payment network controls the data layer that sits on top of bank accounts, it gains visibility into competing payment methods and the ability to undercut or foreclose rivals that depend on that infrastructure.
The Independent Promise and the Consolidation Trap “Mono will continue to operate independently, with no changes to its leadership structure, team, or day-to-day operations,” says Flutterwave, and that its stakes bring “strategic alignment rather than operational control, allowing Mono to maintain its pace of innovation while contributing its open banking infrastructure to Flutterwave’s broader payments ecosystem.”
My sincere question is: What does “strategic alignment” mean for a bank or fintech that competes with Flutterwave on payments but depends on Mono for data and A2A (Account-to-Account) payments?
Who sets pricing and the feature roadmap when Flutterwave and another large client both need the same capability? And why is there no mention of Chinese walls, data‑segregation policies, or independent governance around competitively sensitive information in the public materials?
Leaving rival fintechs guessing how “strategic alignment” will shape pricing, feature prioritisation, and long‑term dependence on an infra layer their competitor now owns.
Analysts pointing to Okra’s shutdown argue that, unlike in more mature markets, where regulators mandate robust data‑governance and exit plans, Nigeria’s young open‑banking regime has yet to prove it can manage the systemic risk posed by an infrastructure provider hanging hands or failing.
With Okra out of the picture, Mono’s acquisition leaves Flutterwave owning the only open‑banking platform at a true national scale in Nigeria, while OnePipe focuses on bank‑partnership embedded finance.
There is no obvious alternative with comparable coverage of Nigerian banks and digital lenders. The deal “signals a broader inflexion point for African fintech, where startups that once aspired to become standalone giants may increasingly find better outcomes by integrating into scaled platforms.”
For new infra entrants, the catch‑22 is brutal: they need multiple bank integrations to win clients, but cannot justify the cost of those integrations without clients, all while competing against Flutterwave, which can bundle payment processing with discounted access to Mono’s APIs.
“If the economy is going to be credit-driven, you need deep data intelligence to know how people earn and spend,” Mono’s Abdulhamid Hassan has argued. Thus, when that intelligence flows through pipes owned by Flutterwave, every digital lender’s underwriting logic risks becoming at least partially visible to a dominant payments rival that sits both above and below them in the stack.
What happens next?
Flutterwave explicitly states that it aims to build something akin to “the operating system for African trade” on its Mono acquisition microsite. TechCrunch and others confirm that it “powers local and cross‑border payments in over 30 African countries,” and that Mono enables the addition of onboarding, identity, account verification, risk, and bank-to-bank payments into a single stack.
Nigeria issued its Operational Guidelines for Open Banking in March 2023, with full implementation in August 2025, but these rules promote competition and standardised APIs while saying little about what happens when a central piece of that infrastructure is bought by a dominant player or quietly shut down.
I wonder if CBN will eventually treat open‑banking providers as systemically important infrastructure, with special rules on ownership, pricing, and data portability.
Can rival fintechs realistically afford to build in‑house API stacks to escape Mono, or does the bank‑integration and compliance burden make that a non‑starter?
Is OnePipe, with its bank‑partnership model, the only credible domestic alternative, and can it match Mono’s coverage quickly enough? The question isn’t whether Flutterwave will abuse its new position in the infrastructure; it’s whether African fintechs and their regulators can afford to find out.
When the plumber also owns the water supply, everyone else is just renting pipes.
About the Author
Babatunde Fatai leads emerging technology strategy and implementation at MTN Nigeria, where he builds solutions that drive digital transformation and profitability across Africa’s largest telecom market.
