On January 5, 2026, Flutterwave, Africa’s largest payments processor, announced the acquisition of Mono, one of Nigeria’s most important financial-infrastructure startups, in a deal reportedly valued between $25 million and $40 million. On the surface, it looked like another fintech acquisition. In reality, it changes something far more fundamental: who controls the pipes that Nigeria’s digital finance flows through. Modern fintech is less about flashy apps than about plumbing—the invisible pipes that move data and money between banks and the apps people use every day. Whoever owns that plumbing shapes how the entire system works. Seen through that lens, Flutterwave’s acquisition of Mono is not just strategic. It is structural.
1. Flutterwave now owns pipes its competitors rely on
Most fintech apps—wallets, digital lenders, BNPL platforms—do not connect directly to every Nigerian bank. Building separate connections to dozens of banks would be slow, expensive, and fragile. Instead, they rely on shared infrastructure that maintains those connections for everyone. This infrastructure is delivered through APIs, which are simply standardised digital pathways into banks. At the level of a single transaction, an API behaves like a waiter—carrying a request from an app to a bank and bringing back the response. But when millions of such requests flow through the same route every day, that waiter effectively becomes plumbing. Mono is one of the largest pieces of that plumbing in Nigeria.
Mono’s CEO, Abdulhamid Hassan, has said that nearly all Nigerian digital lenders rely on Mono in some form, particularly for credit scoring and bank payments. Many of those lenders and payment apps compete directly with Flutterwave.
With this acquisition, they are now running critical parts of their business through pipes owned by Gbenga Agboola and his team. The analogy is simple: competing airlines are now sharing a runway owned by one airline.
2. Mono sits exactly where money quietly flows
To understand why this ownership matters, it helps to see where Mono sits in the system. Mono is not a bank. It does not hold customer funds. It functions like a universal connector in the financial plumbing—one set of pipes that links many banks to many fintechs, so each fintech does not have to lay its own underground network. Through this infrastructure, Mono enables:
Bank-account verification
Income and spending analysis
Credit assessment
Account-to-account (A2A) payments
A2A payments are simply direct bank transfers, automated and embedded inside apps. No cards, no POS machines, no intermediary wallets—just money flowing directly from one bank account to another the moment a button is tapped. Mono says it has powered more than 8 million bank-account linkages, touching roughly 12% of Nigeria’s banked population, and delivered over 100 billion financial data points to fintechs. At that scale, Mono is no longer a peripheral service. It is part of the country’s financial plumbing.
3. Once connected to the pipes, leaving is costly
Shared plumbing works efficiently—until you try to replace it. The industry term for Mono’s role is open banking. Despite the name, open banking does not mean your bank account is open to the world. It means you give permission for a trusted third party to access specific information or perform specific actions on your behalf.
A useful analogy is giving an accountant limited access:
They can see what you approve
They can do specific things you authorise
They cannot do anything else
Once a fintech integrates an open-banking provider like Mono, that connection runs through onboarding, identity checks, credit models, payments, and fraud systems. Switching providers is not like changing email apps. Founders describe it as renovating a house while people are still living in it—the walls, pipes, and wiring all have to be touched without collapsing the structure. That is why infrastructure businesses are “sticky.” Once fintechs plug into the pipes, they rarely unplug.
4. One of the alternative pipes has already been shut off
That lock-in would matter less if there were many comparable alternatives. But Nigeria recently lost one. Another open-banking startup, Okra, raised about $16.5 million before shutting down in May 2025, returning part of its capital to investors. Okra’s exit reduced redundancy in Nigeria’s infrastructure layer, leaving Mono as the only open-banking provider with true national scale. That context is critical. Flutterwave’s acquisition is far more consequential in a market where one of the few alternative pipes has already been capped.
5. Even “other routes” may still feed into the same plumbing
Some fintechs appear to avoid Mono by using other platforms. One of them is OnePipe, which focuses on embedded finance and bank partnerships rather than pure data aggregation. But even here, the plumbing metaphor holds. OnePipe’s founder has publicly stated that some OnePipe-powered products rely on third-party APIs—including Mono’s—for certain functions. In other words, some routes that look independent on the surface still send water through the same underground pipes. If that architecture remains unchanged, Flutterwave’s ownership of Mono reaches further than it first appears—not through coercion, but through system design.
6. Other countries have treated pipe ownership as a competition issue
This concern is not theoretical. In 2020, Visa attempted to acquire Plaid, a major U.S. open-banking provider. Regulators blocked the deal. Their reasoning was straightforward: when a dominant payments company controls the pipes that connect bank accounts to apps, it gains visibility and leverage that can quietly suppress competition—even if nothing breaks immediately. The lesson was clear: financial plumbing is not neutral infrastructure. Nigeria’s open-banking rules, finalised in 2023, focus on consent and security, but say little about what happens when a dominant player acquires a core piece of that plumbing.
What happens next?
Flutterwave says it wants to build “the operating system for African trade,” a single stack that brings together payments, identity, risk, data, and onboarding. From a purely commercial standpoint, the ambition is coherent: scale favours integration, and integrated platforms tend to move faster and cheaper than fragmented ones.
The harder questions arise at the level of the system. Nigeria’s regulatory framework for open banking is still young, and it has yet to fully grapple with what happens when a core piece of financial infrastructure comes under the control of a dominant market participant. Should open-banking providers be treated as systemically important utilities rather than ordinary startups? Should special rules apply around ownership, pricing, or the segregation of competitively sensitive data? And can rival fintechs realistically escape dependency on shared infrastructure without breaking the very interoperability that makes digital finance efficient?
These are no longer abstract concerns. When a single company owns the consumer-facing app, the commercial marketplace, and the pipes that sit underneath them, competition does not vanish overnight. It erodes quietly, becoming thinner, more conditional, and more fragile.
In digital finance, control of the pipes ultimately determines the flow.
