Technology
Top 10 Players in Nigerian Fintech Space
By Adedapo Adesanya
The Nigerian financial technology space, like the sky, is wide enough to accommodate many players as the ways of doing financial transactions have been disrupted by digital innovations.
Contrary to what many might believe, the Nigerian government saw the possibility of this and in 2007, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) launched the Payment Systems Vision 2020 (PSV 2020). This singular vision from the apex bank can be viewed as the catalyst that spurred the need for fintech companies to start multiplying over the years.
This CBN’s activity of 2007 can be considered as the birth of another era. The PSV 2020 was the first time the CBN set forward a reasonable policy for a future cashless society.
Prior to this, there were technology companies in existence but then, they were not able to sit at the table with traditional banks, who had the largest share of the buffet. But within the space of 15 years, rapid growth has changed the narrative.
Now, the fintech space in Nigeria is very competitive as there are countless numbers of fintech startups/companies competing for market share. This means even the traditional banks are being forced to innovate to guarantee their survival amidst the spread of fintech startups or digital banks.
As at the past decade, the fintech industry was somewhat a $20 billion market but the estimated size as at now is $128 billion and this is expected to rapidly expand with an annual average of 24 per cent and could top $310 million in 2022.
In Nigeria, there are an estimated 250 fintech companies with their skin in the game, all jousting for offer services from agriculture technology to savings and investments to crowdfunding to mobile payments to cryptocurrencies.
The diversification of these offerings is making it possible to align with places where traditional banks may not be located and are pushing to achieve the CBN’s goal of financial inclusion. The CBN has said that Nigeria will attain 95 per cent financial inclusion by 2024 and one cannot but wonder the role which fintechs will play to ensure this.
Business Post has streamlined the long list of players to 10 game-changers who are driving digital transactions and offering solutions that will not only close the gap in banking but are revolutionising how Nigerians pay for services, save and borrow money, make international payments, and even improve financial relationships among companies and even countries.
Interswitch
Interswitch is one of the early players. It burst into the scene in 2002 and was founded by Mitchell Elegbe as a transaction switching and electronic payments processing company. Today, Interswitch’s technology processes over 500 million transactions a month while its Verve payment card is the largest domestic debit card scheme in the country and has expanded outside of Africa.
Interswitch created the first electronic switch whereby Nigerian financial institutions could communicate and thereby operate ATMs and point of sales operations. The company now provides much of the transaction systems for Nigeria’s online banking system.
In 2019, Interswitch confirmed a $1 billion evaluation after Visa, an American multinational financial services corporation invested $200 million for 20 per cent of its stake.
FlutterWave
As an umbrella fintech, Flutterwave founded by Iyin Aboyeji in 2014, completes payment services from more than 68 online payment gateways in Nigeria. It allows clients to tap into its application programming interface (API) and work with Flutterwave developers to customize payments applications.
The company majorly offers business to business (B2B) payments services for companies operating in Africa to pay other companies on the continent and abroad. Some of its customers include Uber, Booking.com and Jumia.
In 2019, Flutterwave processed 107 million transactions worth $5.4 billion, according to data on its website.
Paga
Founded by Tayo Oviosu and Jay Alabraba, the mobile payment company enables people to digitally send and receive money and creating simple financial access for everyone. In Nigeria, Paga has over 9 million customers and 17,000 agents.
It was initially launched in Nigeria to profit from the buildup of cash money in the financial industry and to execute financial services for all residents in Africa. However, it was one of the early birds to tap into mobile banking with customers able to access it multitudes of service offerings by dialling *242#.
PiggyVest
PiggyVest is an online savings platform that empowers savers to put away funds that they would prefer not to withdraw effectively. Founded by Somto Ifezue, Odunayo Eweniyi, and Joshua Chibueze, the fintech as at 2019 has over one million users and has saved up to $80 million.
PiggyVest doesn’t just allow users to save, it also allows them to invest their money while offering a return within a period. It offers between 10 – 15.5 per cent on savings. Investments can get up to 22 per cent returns in one year.
One key feature that has found home with users is the SafeLock feature which was modelled after treasury bill transactions, where a buyer is paid a fixed percentage of their capital depending on how long you permit the government to hold your money.
Business Post understands that the average amount in a Piggyvest SafeLock is about N500,000 and is typically locked for between 4 and 6 months.
Paystack
Founded by Ezra Olubi and Shola Akinlade, Paystack offers payment solutions to businesses in Nigeria. They are one of the leading online payment gateways in the county. The fintech company, which was founded in 2015, has quickly become one of the favourite payment solutions for tech startups in the country.
Its last round of funding came in August 2018 when they raised $10.2 million in Series A funding led by Stripe and had previously recorded four previous fundings in seeds and non-equity assurance.
eTranzact
Also, one of the early players, it was launched in 2003 as a multi-application, multi-network and multi-channel electronic payment platform that supports every significant network; including AMEX, VISA and MasterCard.
eTranzact is one of the Fintech companies in Nigeria designed as a credible option in contrast to all transaction which is either cash or cheque based. The platform capacity is with the end goal that any arrangement driven by customer payment can be automated on the platform.
eTranzact as a Switch processes payment requests from various channels – Web, ATM, POS, mobile-utilizing automated procedures.
The switching platform validates transaction requests subsequent to running security checks on the payment cards.
Nigerians use it to pay at cinemas, event shows, and for other payments. The company has tech solutions for players in various sectors of the economy including banking, education, the financial market, travel and transportation, telecommunications, and public administrations.
Paylater (Now known as Carbon)
Carbon is a mobile-only digital bank founded by Chijioke and Ngozi Dozie. It provides innovative financial services to the financially underserved. It was formerly known as Paylater. Carbon offers bill payments, fund transfer, and savings products, in addition to loans.
They offer instant loans to Nigerians without collateral. With a very competitive interest rate, they have dominated the fintech sector. The app is used by over 1 million people to secure loans and other financial solutions.
In 2019, they secured $5m debt investment from New York and Nairobi-based debt platform Lendable. Mostly known for giving instant loan, they have since diversified into many areas such as mobile top-ups, investment and digital banking.
Business Post reported earlier this year that as at last year, the fintech had disbursed over 975,000 loans. This boosted its revenue as it recorded over 25,000 loans top-up, bring about a N6.3 billion in revenue.
Remita
Remita made the cut because of its affiliations to small and medium scale enterprises, multinationals, state governments, government agencies, NGOs, schools and educational institutions alongside Individuals to receive and make payments electronically.
Developed by SystemSpecs, Remita processes over two million salaries per month for Nigerian companies. In 2016, Remita processed N1.36 trillion for the Nigerian government when it consolidated all federal ministry and agency accounts under the Treasury Single Account (TSA) scheme.
The company started out as a developer and reseller of human resources and accounting tools. It eventually developed HumanManager, an HR and payroll system for corporate environments. Its payroll system has since expanded to Ghana, Benin Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe and South Sudan.
Kuda Bank
Kuda is the first digital-only bank in Nigeria with a standalone license. Unlike others, it is not fintech that has a mobile wallet or a mobile app affiliated with an existing bank, it is a bank on its own.
Based in Lagos and London, following its banking license from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), this gives it a status different from other fintech startups.
Part of its offerings includes: checking accounts with no monthly fees, a free debit card, savings and peer-to-peer (P2P) payments options on its platform.
Customers can open an account within five minutes and will get an account number and can request a physical debit card afterwards.
CowryWise
Considered the direct rival of PiggyVest, it was founded by Edward Popoola and Razak Ahmed. The fintech allows users to save for long-term goals including home, vacation, family, emergency, education, business, retirement, among others.
A user can invest in Nigeria’s money market via mutual funds. The platforms list funds like Afrivest Plutus Fund, United Capital Money Market Fund, Meristem Money Market Fund and more. Users can access Dollar mutual funds.
Cowrywise also offers between 10 – 15 per cent on savings while Mutual funds on its platform can get up to 20 per cent per annum.
Technology
WhatsApp Introduces Web Calling, Call Transfer, QuickHD Features
By Aduragbemi Omiyale
WhatsApp has been updated with a web calling feature, allowing users to now make and receive audio and video calls, both one-on-one and group, directly from WhatsApp Web.
A notice from the Meta-owned messaging platform disclosed that this feature works without the need to download any app.
It was disclosed that this update was made to WhatsApp to make it easier for users to make calls wherever they are and on whatever device, phone or laptop.
Users will have access to features available on their other devices, including screen sharing, reactions, and a dedicated Calls tab with full call history and favourites, all from their browsers.
WhatsApp noted that calls from this feature are end-to-end encrypted, with no time limits and at no cost, as it is the same private experience they expect from the platform.
WhatsApp has also been embedded with easy call transfer, enabling the movement of an active group call from one device to another without hanging up. Users can seamlessly transfer calls to WhatsApp Web or Desktop when they arrive home to collaborate on a larger screen – or vice versa.
The platform further said it now has QuickHD, which allows for an improved video experience at the beginning of a call. With QuickHD, users can now enjoy high-definition video immediately in the very first few seconds of the call.
In addition, it has launched noise suppression to remove the background noise around callers so their voices come through clearly to the person on the other end, even in loud or busy environments. This can be managed at any time in in-call settings.
WhatsApp said these features are rolling out gradually and will be available to everyone soon, expressing its desire to make WhatsApp calling simpler to use.
Technology
Modded Hosting With Reliable Backups: Biome Types Guide
Modded Minecraft worlds take weeks to build. Custom biomes, terraformed landscapes, established bases — losing any of it to a corrupted chunk or a failed update is devastating. Backups aren’t optional for modded servers. They’re essential.
Modded hosting with reliable backups protects everything players have built across every minecraft biome types the pack introduces — without requiring manual backup routines that nobody remembers to run.
Why Modded Worlds Are More Vulnerable to Data Loss
Vanilla Minecraft worlds are relatively stable. Modded worlds have more ways to break. Mod updates can corrupt chunk data if block IDs change. Crashes during chunk generation leave partial files. Automated farms that run while no players are online can cause chunk-level issues over time.
Biomes added by mods require extra care. Changing biome mods later can cause unexpected problems. If the old biome data no longer exists, Minecraft may not know how to read parts of the world anymore. The Minecraft Wiki explains that every generated chunk keeps its own biome information in the save. Modded biomes require their mod to be present to load correctly — removing the mod without migrating chunks first causes permanent data loss in those areas.
Minecraft Biome Types: What Mods Add
People often focus on giant mountains or rare structures, but smaller biome changes matter too. A carefully designed minecraft grass biome can completely change the appearance of an entire region. Once that combines with improved forests, rivers, and mountain generation, exploration naturally takes longer because there’s almost always another interesting place nearby. There’s a massive difference once biome mods are installed. Biomes O’ Plenty alone adds over 80 biomes. Terralith adds another 95 plus, although it still builds worlds using Minecraft’s regular generation system rather than a custom one. Oh The Biomes You’ll Go adds tropical and fantasy biomes not found in either.
Each of these creates a richer world to explore — and more unique terrain to protect. A player who spends two sessions exploring and settling in a modded cherry blossom grove loses something irreplaceable if that chunk gets corrupted without a backup.
Content creator and modpack player Noxite has described modded biome exploration as one of the most memorable experiences in the game — “every new biome feels like discovering a location that exists only in your world.” Backups protect that discovery.
Many players only start thinking about backups after something goes wrong. It’s surprisingly easy for a modded world to develop problems. Maybe the server restarts halfway through chunk generation, or a mod update changes world data in a way the old save no longer understands. Even experienced server owners don’t get through every update without issues. Sometimes everything looks fine until someone explores a new biome and discovers broken chunks. At that point, having a recent backup is usually the simplest solution instead of trying to repair damaged terrain piece by piece.
What a Reliable Backup System Looks Like for Modded Servers
For modded worlds, backup requirements go beyond vanilla minimums:
- Daily automated backups — at minimum; hourly for active community servers
- Full world backups — not just player data; entire world folder including all dimensions
- Pre-update snapshots — automatic backup triggered before any mod or server update
- Offsite storage — backups stored separately from the server to survive hardware failure
- Easy restoration — one-click restore to a specific backup without technical support

Protecting Every Biome You’ve Explored
Minecraft biomes wiki entries for modded biomes often include notes about save compatibility across versions. The community’s experience is consistent: mod updates break worlds more often than player actions do. Regular backups are the only reliable protection.
Choose modded hosting with reliable backups that runs automatically, stores multiple restore points, and makes restoration simple. The time investment in setting up proper backups is always less than the time lost rebuilding after a preventable data loss event.
Technology
5 Ways AI is Transforming Consumer Intelligence and Analytics
The rules have changed. How companies actually know their customers — really know them — looks almost nothing like it did ten years ago. Old-school research methods are drowning. Too slow, too narrow, too dependent on humans manually stitching together datasets that have already gone cold. Markets shift in days now, not quarters. And the cost of a slow read on consumer behavior keeps climbing. This isn’t just a tooling upgrade. The underlying logic of how businesses decide what to build, what to charge, and who to reach has been gutted and rebuilt from scratch. Staying reactive isn’t a strategy anymore. It’s a liability.
1. Real-Time Data Processing and Pattern Recognition
Consumer intelligence used to run on stale numbers. Analysts dug into data weeks — sometimes months — after whatever actually happened. Modern AI kills that lag. Entirely. These systems chew through enormous volumes of behavioral data on the fly, surfacing patterns that human teams couldn’t find in the same timeframe with ten times the headcount. Machine learning algorithms can process millions of customer interactions, transactions, and behavioral signals simultaneously — pulling clean signal out of what would otherwise be undifferentiated noise. A retailer can track sentiment across social media, reviews, and support tickets right now, catching a brewing problem or an emerging trend in hours rather than weeks. Inventory shifts, pricing moves, message pivots — all of it happens before a trend fully crystallizes. That’s a different game entirely.
2. Predictive Analytics and Consumer Behavior Forecasting
Here’s what actually changed: AI stops consumer intelligence from being a backward-looking exercise. Instead of cataloguing what customers already did, companies can now forecast what they’re likely to do next — and with striking accuracy. Advanced ML models thread together historical patterns and live behavioral signals to predict churn, flag high-value prospects, and project demand across entire product lines. A telecom company can spot which customers are quietly drifting toward a competitor before they ever make the switch — and intervene first. That’s not a marginal improvement. It’s a fundamentally different posture. Resources flow toward the segments that actually matter, rather than spreading thin across the whole base and hoping something sticks.
3. Personalization at Scale
Consumers expect personalized experiences. Full stop. Meeting that expectation at scale — for millions of people at once — is simply beyond what human analysts and traditional segmentation can deliver. Machine learning models read individual purchase histories, browsing patterns, preferences, and demographic signals to build dynamic profiles that drive product recommendations, custom messaging, and tailored interfaces. When building and refining these individualized profiles, marketers who need to enrich their first-party data with verified behavioral signals rely on audience data providers to ensure their models are trained on accurate, high-quality consumer information. An e-commerce platform can serve each visitor a genuinely different experience — different layouts, different offers, different content — all built around that visitor’s unique fingerprint. Conversion lifts. Lifetime value climbs. People respond when recommendations actually fit their lives, not just the average of everyone else’s.
4. Sentiment Analysis and Brand Perception Monitoring
Knowing how consumers feel about a brand means wading through unstructured mess. Reviews, comment threads, support tickets, social posts, video captions — none of it parses cleanly by hand at any useful speed. Natural language processing handles it. NLP systems automatically scan text-based content across digital channels, classifying sentiment as positive, negative, or neutral while bucketing feedback by topic, product feature, or customer segment. An automaker can track online conversations about a specific reliability concern and catch it before it snowballs into a full-blown reputation crisis. No waiting for quarterly surveys. No lag. Brand perception monitoring becomes continuous — and decisions about product fixes, messaging shifts, or service interventions get grounded in real signal rather than gut instinct.
5. Competitive Intelligence and Market Positioning Analysis
Competitive intelligence used to mean manual tracking, sprawling spreadsheets, and perpetually incomplete pictures. AI automates the entire collection-and-analysis loop. ML models watch competitor pricing moves, product launches, promotions, and messaging shifts across digital channels — then stack that data against a company’s own position. Gaps surface. Threats register earlier. A financial services firm can monitor exactly which themes competitors are pushing on social media and which ones are actually generating engagement — then sharpen their own positioning accordingly. Real-time visibility into competitive dynamics means strategic calls about where to invest, which markets to enter, and how to stand apart in crowded categories aren’t made blind anymore.
Conclusion
What AI has done to consumer intelligence isn’t incremental. It’s structural. Real-time processing of massive datasets. Forecasting future behavior instead of autopsying the past. Personalization that reaches millions, not hundreds. Continuous sentiment monitoring. Automated competitive tracking. None of these were realistic options a decade ago. They are now. Companies that wire these capabilities into their core operations make faster, sharper decisions — ones that show up directly in revenue, satisfaction scores, and market share. Those that don’t will keep falling further behind. And the gap between organizations that wield these tools well and those still grinding through traditional approaches? It’s not closing. It’s widening every quarter.


