In African fintech, the first wave was about building the rails: switching infrastructure, API payment layers, POS networks, mobile wallets; the core plumbing that allowed money to move. MSMEs, meanwhile, received a handful of dashboards and “tools”, but if you sit with a typical trader today, their real operating stack is still Instagram, WhatsApp for orders, cash for most transactions, and informal credit from suppliers. In other words, the first wave of fintech infrastructure hasn’t yet translated into deep digital adoption at the last mile.

MSMEs are far too central to be an afterthought. They account for most jobs on the continent and a significant share of GDP, yet the global MSME financing gap remains in the trillions, with Africa bearing a disproportionate share. At the same time, digital activity is no longer theoretical: African payment volumes are heading into the trillions, social media user numbers are in the hundreds of millions, and an entire generation of merchants now runs their businesses on Instagram and WhatsApp. On top of that, you have almost $100bn in annual remittances flowing into Africa, much of it intra-African and still flowing through informal FX networks. The picture becomes clearer: the real opportunity isn't in standalone MSME SaaS. The real winners will be the platforms that sit directly on these payment, commerce, and remittance flows, and use the resulting data to underwrite meaningful working capital at scale.

For years, most African fintech stories focused on wallets, local payments and neobanks. Useful, but mostly about domestic flows. Meanwhile the SMEs that actually want to trade across Africa have been stuck with paper forms, corridor-specific rules, manual customs documents and expensive FX. Intra-African trade has remained around 15 to 16 percent of total trade, even though AfCFTA has been positioned as a catalyst for regional value chains.

That begins to shift in 2026. Tariff and non-tariff barriers under AfCFTA are slowly coming down. Instant payment systems across more than 30 markets now process nearly 2 trillion dollars a year and are starting to interconnect. PAPSS, EAPS and the emerging SADC and ECOWAS payment linkages show early signs of scale, with PAPSS volumes projected to grow materially as more commercial banks and central banks plug in over 2025 and 2026. Several customs and e-invoicing digitisation pilots in ECOWAS corridors are also showing governments that automation reduces leakage, which increases appetite for adoption.

The missing layer is the one that sits on top of these rails. Africa will need SME-first export operating systems that package payments, FX, customs, e-invoicing, logistics and compliance into something a small business owner can actually use. Not another generic B2B dashboard, but a true operating fabric that makes it realistic for a Ghanaian, Kenyan or Ivorian SME to treat the rest of the continent as a home market.

In the last cycle, African fintech was the headline act. Consumer apps, wallets and neo-banks were the visible face of the continent’s tech story. Many of those products were thin layers on top of telco rails, subsidised by growth equity and grant capital, and they did an important job: they proved demand.

We are now in a more disciplined phase. Fintech funding in Africa fell by around 37% from 2022 to 2023 and dropped a further 45% in 2024 to roughly $857m, even as overall fintech revenues on the continent are projected to reach about $47bn by 2028. In other words, the opportunity is growing while capital has become more selective. At the same time, 2025 is already on track to beat 2024’s total startup funding, with around $2.8bn raised by African startups by August, which shows that there is still plenty of money for credible models. Large players like TymeBank hitting profitability and attracting $150m+ rounds at unicorn valuations are proving that sustainable, mass-market digital finance is possible.

The next generation of winners will look less like “super apps” and more like infrastructure: settlement, risk, identity and treasury pipelines that every other sector builds on.