Paystack’s Akinlade puts business infrastructure at centre of next growth phase

Paystack looks beyond payments as it enters its second decade

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.

African creators can build a global audience from their first post, but getting that audience to pay them, reliably and across borders, is still hard. Payment infrastructure that works every time would fix it, the founders of Selar, Mainstack and Raenest said on a panel at Moonshot by TechCabal.

The panel focused on everyday creators, far from the top tier with millions of followers, and most of them earn little. The Nigerian Creator Economy Report 2025 found that 56.45% of Nigerian creators earn less than $100 a month from their work.

Ayobami Oyaleke, founder and CEO of Mainstack, which he described as a “commerce platform and financial back office for creators” operating in about 150 countries, said an audience is revenue waiting to be collected. “As much as you have the audience, there’s a revenue path for you,” he said.

The trouble is that most creators don’t know how to turn a following into income, or they hit a wall when they try to collect it. “Tools only give you the pipe,” Oyaleke said. “You’re still the one running the volume.” Mainstack’s approach is to treat every creator as global from the start so that a first $100 from a buyer abroad doesn’t get lost to payment failures.

Douglas Kendyson founded Selar in 2016 after fielding requests at Paystack from people who wanted to sell digital products online but faced ₦150,000 quotes for a website and unreliable payments. A decade later, Selar is bootstrapped and profitable and says it has paid out more than ₦18 billion ($12.9 million) to nearly 400,000 creators.

Kendyson was clear about what a platform should leave to creators: Selar does not find customers for them, which he called “a very tasking thing.” Its affiliate network, which lets marketers sell a creator’s product for a commission, now brings in more revenue than its subscriptions, he said.

Sodruldeen Mustapha, co-founder and CTO of Raenest, which helps African freelancers get paid from abroad, said the payment feature that matters most is control. Creators already export their talent, he argued, and their earnings should follow: collected from a client anywhere, in any currency, and under the creator’s control once they land.

The three founders agreed on the core problem. A creator in Lagos can have followers in Europe and the United States from day one, but the money struggles to make the same trip.

Kendyson, when asked what the next generation of creators needs, reached for nothing new. A decade in, he said, a new payment gateway seems to appear every week, “yet payments are still very fractured for a lot of us.” The infrastructure that fixes it, he said, “doesn’t even have to be particularly unique. It just has to work.”