CBN grants Flutterwave banking licence to expand financial services

By Progress Godfrey

Flutterwave has received a banking licence from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), allowing the fintech giant to move beyond payments and offer broader financial services to businesses across Africa.

This comes after the company disclosed a processing of over $40 billion in transactions in the past decade. This approval allows businesses to access banking tools, manage funds and scale operations on a single platform.

Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Flutterwave, Olugbenga Agboola, made the announcement in a statement on Thursday, saying the development represents a major milestone in the company’s growth and ambition to build a more integrated financial system.

“Today, Flutterwave announces a Nigerian banking license. It is a defining step in our 10-year journey to build the financial infrastructure powering Africa’s future.

“A decade ago, we started with a simple belief: better infrastructure changes everything. Payments failed too often, settlement was slow, and expanding meant rebuilding from scratch. So we focused on connecting what was fragmented,” the CEO said.

Flutterwave, founded in 2016, began as a payment infrastructure provider focused on simplifying cross-border transactions and has since expanded across multiple African markets. The new licence follows its rapid growth and recent strategic moves, including the acquisition of Mono.

“With the acquisition of Mono earlier this year, we deepened that connectivity. Now we are going further by building a unified platform where businesses can open accounts, accept and send payments, manage payouts, run payroll, and operate across currencies in one place, with access to lending and working capital powered by real transaction data,” he explained.

“We can now build, innovate and solve customer problems faster than before because we now control the value chain of payments in Nigeria. Our destiny is now in our hands,” Agboola added.

The development emphasises Flutterwave’s push to deliver end-to-end financial services, showing a growing convergence between fintech firms and traditional banking as demand for integrated digital finance solutions continues to rise.

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