Nigeria SEC urges founders to list in local bourse

Nigeria’s securities regulator has urged local founders to look closer to home for capital, arguing that crowdfunding and debt markets can offer a route to an eventual stock market listing.

Emomotimi Agama, director-general of the Securities and Exchange Commission, told Moonshot by TechCabal in Lagos on Wednesday that founders could start by raising money from people who already trusted them, then use instruments such as commercial paper to test investor appetite. Debt could also help entrepreneurs fund growth without surrendering equity, he said.

But he warned against using short-term bank loans to finance long-term ambitions. “That’s a mismatch that will drown you.”

“The problem that a lot of people have is that they are shy of speaking to the regulator or even financial advisers,” Agama said. “Once we understand your constraints, we are also able to tell you exactly how to go about it and what you need to do to raise capital.”

The SEC wants the local market to absorb more of the money founders now chase overseas. On October 19, Vice President Kashim Shettima unveiled the Nigerian Capital Market Master Plan 2.0, a 10-year roadmap targeting ₦750 trillion ($549 billion) in market capitalisation by 2036. Agama said the market has already grown from ₦55 trillion ($40.3 billion) in 2024 to more than ₦162 trillion ($118.6 billion). He pointed to the Dangote Petroleum Refinery IPO, which closed on October 27 after an SEC-approved extension, saying investors from 54 African countries subscribed.

Digital asset firms got a blunter message. In January, the SEC raised the minimum capital for crypto exchanges and custodians to ₦2 billion ($1.46 million) from ₦500 million ($366,000), with a compliance deadline of June 30, 2027. Agama said capital requirements test whether a company can carry out its business, and he urged young founders to pool resources with partners. “You cannot be a cockroach and decide to wrestle with elephants,” he said.

Licensing has also moved slowly. An audience member from the Virtual Asset Service Providers Association asked why no crypto platform is fully licensed, more than two years after the SEC launched its Accelerated Regulatory Incubation Programme (ARIP) in June 2024. Quidax and Busha received provisional licences that August and are still awaiting full approval. Agama said the SEC has charged ARIP firms no fees while it studies the risks in their businesses, and that it cannot act alone because other regulators share the space.

“If you are not an investor, then you must be a victim,” he said, meaning anyone who invests in an unregulated business.

For founders building stablecoin or tokenisation products, the lesson is to engage early. Agama said the SEC oversees digital asset activity outside payments, while the Central Bank of Nigeria handles payments. Firms that fall under SEC rules and stay away are in violation, he said, and “ignorance of the law is not an excuse.”

Payment providers must help businesses manage cash flow, understand customers and reduce fraud as accepting digital payments becomes only the first step in adopting technology, fintech executives told Moonshot by TechCabal 2026.

Speaking at a panel titled “The Business Behind the Transaction”, executives from Mastercard, Remita and OPay said merchants needed services that connected payments to their wider operations, alongside reliable support and staff training.

“Let’s understand the customer, let’s solve for the customer problem rather than providing a generic product push across the different businesses,” said Shabir Ahmed, Mastercard’s Senior Vice President for Customer Solutions in Central Africa.

Ahmed identified connectivity, data-driven intelligence and trust as priorities for providers seeking to help businesses operate more effectively. His comments proved that the usefulness of payment technology depends on what businesses can do with it beyond collecting money.

For Remita, that means extending services into financial management, invoicing and statutory compliance, said Abimbola Onyluka, the company’s divisional head for corporate and consumer business.

Businesses need tools that connect their financial information to banks, lenders and regulators, she said. A payment record becomes more useful when it can support borrowing, reporting and decisions about how to manage the business.

But expanding the range of services also requires providers to maintain the reliability of their core payments operations. Onyluka stressed the need for dependable support and the quick resolution of downtime, as payment failures can interrupt sales and affect customer service.

Isimeme Ayobami Owobo, OPay’s director for key account merchants, said businesses that grew faster integrated technology into their operations and trained employees to use it effectively.

Installing a payment terminal was only part of that process, he argued. Merchants also needed to make fuller use of the tools available to them, including QR-code payments that could help speed up transactions.

The discussion highlighted a challenge for payment providers seeking a larger role in merchants’ businesses. Processing a transaction gives them a point of contact with the customer, but turning that relationship into a broader service requires an understanding of how each business operates.

The executives’ argument was that payment acceptance alone offers a limited measure of digital adoption. The greater value comes when businesses can use the information generated by transactions to manage cash, serve customers and plan growth.

Paystack will look beyond payment acceptance to address more of businesses’ financial needs as it enters its second decade, co-founder and chief executive Shola Akinlade said at Moonshot 2026 in Lagos.

Akinlade described how the Nigerian fintech’s payments infrastructure had supported businesses across other sectors, arguing that its next phase would build on the same premise: enabling entrepreneurs to concentrate on their products.

The discussion traced Paystack’s development from a company helping Nigerian merchants collect payments online to a broader financial services group with operations across several African markets.

“I feel very qualified to talk about ambition because a lot of my ambitions over the last 10 years have been realised,” he said. “If you know anything about the Paystack story, we had a simple ambition to build to help merchants accept payments in Nigeria and then probably Africa.”

Akinlade used PiggyVest, the Nigerian savings platform, to illustrate how the infrastructure Paystack developed had enabled businesses beyond its original ambitions.

He recalled how the founders approached Paystack with an idea to automatically debit users’ accounts so they could save money regularly. Paystack already had the infrastructure to support the idea, even though building a savings business was not its own ambition.

“The most exciting thing about that story is that I didn’t do anything. The founders built the business; they took the risk,” he said. “The only thing we had to do was focus on building our infrastructure.”

The experience, he added, showed why infrastructure businesses could have an influence beyond the services they directly offered.

“That’s what really gets exciting about building infrastructure because you don’t know what people are going to build on it.”

Akinlade said that influence also extended to former employees who had gone on to establish companies of their own. He cited Douglas Kendyson, founder of Selar, which helps creators sell digital products; Femi Aluko and Olumide Ojo, co-founders of food delivery company Chowdeck; and Abdulhamid Hassan, co-founder of financial infrastructure provider Mono.

“One of the things I have learned in the last 10 years is that ambition is contagious,” he said. “When you achieve the ambition, every other person you engage with, the ambition continues to go round.”

Amandine Lobelle, the company’s chief operating office, outlined the company’s geographical expansion, saying Paystack had grown its footprint across Ghana, Kenya, Côte d’Ivoire and South Africa, while securing regulatory licences for Egypt and Rwanda.

The discussion comes as Paystack broadens its corporate structure and product offering. In January, it announced The Stack Group, a parent company encompassing Paystack, consumer payments app Zap, Paystack Microfinance Bank and venture studio TSG Labs.

Akinlade said the company was expanding its view of the problems it could solve as customers’ needs developed beyond collecting payments.