Michael Adesola, the Acting Managing Director and CEO of Belema Fintech, has urged African fintech companies to prioritise the development of resilient digital infrastructure over aggressive user acquisition to ensure long-term sustainability.
Speaking at the Nigerian Fintech Forum, Adesola argued that the continent’s fintech revolution cannot achieve lasting success if the systems powering digital transactions remain unreliable.
He challenged stakeholders across the financial technology ecosystem to look beyond vanity metrics, such as transaction volumes and total user growth, and instead focus on the stability of the underlying architecture.
According to Adesola, the ability of a platform to maintain high uptime and reliable processing is the primary driver of customer trust, which is the most critical asset for any financial service provider.
The CEO noted that as more consumers migrate to digital platforms for essential financial services, the cost of system failures increases, potentially alienating users and slowing the pace of financial inclusion across Africa.
This shift in focus comes at a time when many African fintechs have pursued a “growth at all costs” strategy, often scaling their user bases faster than their technical capacity can support.
Operational Resilience and Regulatory Pressure
The call for more resilient infrastructure aligns with increasing scrutiny from regulators across the continent. In Nigeria, the Central Bank of Nigeria has consistently emphasised the need for operational stability and risk management among payment service providers.
Systemic outages have previously plagued both traditional banks and emerging fintechs in Nigeria, leading to significant consumer frustration and economic friction.
Industry analysts suggest that the next phase of fintech evolution in Africa will likely be defined by “infrastructure-as-a-service” models, where companies provide the robust backend tools that other startups use to build their products.
This approach reduces the burden on individual startups to build massive proprietary infrastructure from scratch and allows for a more standardised level of reliability across the sector.
The World Bank has previously highlighted that digital payment systems are essential for reducing the cost of remittances and improving the efficiency of government-to-person payments in sub-Saharan Africa.
However, the reportage suggests that these benefits are only fully realised when the digital rails are stable enough to handle peak loads without crashing.
Adesola indicated that the industry must move toward a model where reliability is treated as a core product feature rather than a backend afterthought.
This includes investing in cloud redundancy, improved API management, and more sophisticated cybersecurity frameworks to protect transactions from both technical failure and malicious attacks.
The broader African market, including hubs in Kenya and Egypt, faces similar challenges as they scale their mobile money and digital lending ecosystems.
The Nigerian Fintech Forum serves as a critical touchpoint for these discussions, as the country remains one of the primary destinations for fintech investment on the continent.
Industry participants are now expected to integrate more rigorous stress-testing and resilience auditing into their operational cycles to meet the rising expectations of both users and regulators.
The next critical step for the sector will be the establishment of industry-wide benchmarks for uptime and transaction success rates to hold providers accountable.
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