In hindsight, it is not hard to see the play Onafriq, the pan-African payments company, was making when it expanded into Nigeria by acquiring Baxi in 2021. 

Nigeria still relied heavily on cash, and Baxi already had more than 90,000 agents. Onafriq could enter with a ready-made distribution network instead of spending years building one.

The timing looked good, too. OPay and Moniepoint had begun building large agent networks in 2019, while PalmPay entered agent banking later. In 2021, Baxi was already one of Nigeria’s biggest independent agent networks, giving Onafriq an early lead over some newer competitors.

But the lead did not hold. By the end of 2024, PalmPay reportedly had more than 700,000 agents, while Moniepoint had over 800,000 point-of-sale (PoS) terminals. But as of 2025, Baxi had just over 460,000 agents, paling in comparison. In October, it finally decided to shut down the business, months after trying to sell Baxi.

Between the lines: Agent banking became a scale game. Rivals poured money into terminals, agent recruitment, and incentives, making it easier to close the distribution gap. At the same time, agents could work with several providers, making a large network less defensible than it first appeared.

The economics also changed. More terminals entered the market much faster than transaction volumes grew, so providers competed over the same payments. 

Meanwhile, account-to-account (A2A) transfers—direct bank payments—gave customers another way to move money without visiting an agent.

Onafriq’s attempt to sell Baxi before shutting it down shows that the problem was bigger than one bad year. The company had already decided the agent business no longer fit where it wanted to put capital.

Zoom out: Onafriq bought Baxi partly because physical distribution was scarce. Five years later, the market had plenty. Being early gave Baxi a head start, but it did not stop competitors from catching up and, eventually, passing it.