F-Squared Podcast
F-Squared Podcast
Podcast Description
Frontier Fintech is a podcast about the business of fintech in Africa. We speak with founders, executives, investors, and regulators who are shaping financial services across the continent—helping you connect the dots in Pan-African fintech.
Podcast Insights
Content Themes
The podcast focuses on themes including banking transformation, digital innovation, investment opportunities, and regulatory challenges within the African fintech landscape, with episodes offering in-depth discussions, like the transformation journey of I&M Bank and its strategic pivots in the competitive market.
Frontier Fintech is a podcast about the business of fintech in Africa. We speak with founders, executives, investors, and regulators who are shaping financial services across the continent—helping you connect the dots in Pan-African fintech.
In 2009, Tayo Oviosu printed a 300-page regulatory application, packed it into a suitcase, and carried it to Abuja because Nigeria had no framework for mobile payments and someone had to ask the Central Bank to write one. Seventeen years later, the lesson he draws is the one most fintech founders still resist: you cannot bank a billion people by building a bank. You bank them by building the infrastructure other people build on.
Tayo is the founder and CEO of Paga, one of Nigeria's earliest and most enduring fintech companies, founded when M-Pesa was barely two years old. This conversation is a masterclass in strategic discipline; what Paga chose not to build, and why that restraint is the reason it is still standing.
We get into the real economics of agent banking (why roughly 80% of Nigerian agent transactions are cash withdrawals, and what that does to financial-inclusion timelines), why Paga stayed out of the card-gateway war when Paystack and Flutterwave emerged, the AWS/Netflix analogy behind Paga Engine, the Doroki thesis that African retailers need an operating system before they can be banked, and Paga's move into US rails. Through naira devaluations, funding droughts, and the rise of OPay and PalmPay, Paga stayed solvent and stayed focused.
Chapters
00:00 – Introduction
10:00 – The suitcase of binders: cold-calling the CBN in 2009
24:00 – Why Paga stayed out of the card-gateway market
33:00 – The 20-year business: real economics of agent banking
40:00 – ”You cannot bank a billion people by building a bank” — the Paga Engine thesis
44:00 – The Doroki thesis: an operating system for African retailers
47:00 – US rails and hosted dollar accounts (Swift, ACH, Fedwire)
51:00 – Three hours to twelve seconds: reconciliation with Claude Code
Pinned quote ”Revenue is vanity; gross profit pays the bills. We taught our team that everyone acts like an owner and negotiates the best deal for everything, from marketing to supplies.” – Tayo Oviosu
Connect with Tayo & Paga Tayo Oviosu (LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/in/oviosu/ Paga:https://www.mypaga.com/ Doroki: https://doroki.com/
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