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.”

Grey is building its own payment connections between African markets to make cross-border transfers more reliable and to secure the foreign currency needed to settle them, Idorenyin Obong, its co-founder and chief executive, said at a press briefing at Moonshot by TechCabal 2026 on Thursday.

“We have invested in building rails within Africa,” Obong said.

Grey lets individuals and businesses send and receive money across markets including Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana. Moving money between African countries remains slow and costly because payment systems are fragmented, each conversion adds a fee, and dollars or other foreign currency are often scarce.

Obong named two problems. The first is reliability: making sure money arrives when the customer was told it would. The second is liquidity: finding enough of the right currency to complete the transfer. Grey has partnered with providers across its markets to source those currencies and settle transfers in real time, he said.

Most transfers between two African currencies have traditionally gone through the US dollar first. Grey says it now converts directly between some African currencies.

“The crux of the matter is that there used to be a need for an intermediary, but we have built out these exotic currency pairs so that you don’t have to go that extent,” Obong said.

The push follows two product launches this year. In February, Grey launched Grey Business, a multi-currency account for startups and small businesses. In July, it added local-currency deposits in Ghana and Kenya, letting users fund accounts by bank transfer or mobile money.

Regulators are working on the same problem. In June, TechCabal reported that the Central Bank of Nigeria was pursuing closer regional payments integration, including links to the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), which lets African countries settle cross-border payments in their own currencies.

If companies like Grey can settle directly between African currencies, a trader in Lagos paying a supplier in Nairobi would no longer need to buy dollars first, removing one of the costliest steps in trade within the continent.

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.”