Hi Fintech friends 👋,

Here are the highlights of what happened in African Fintech this week;

• Three African Fintechs secured funding.
• African VC faced liquidation over a misused Mastercard Foundation grant.
• M-pesa and Paypal partnered to localize global payments.
• CEO and CTO of African Fintech exited while customers struggled to retrieve funds.
• Kenya’s $400 million ARR fintech was alleged to have racial disparity in employee equity.

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This Week in FintechSabrina Baxter

💸Fundraise and Exits

• Egypt’s Flend raised $3 Million to scale its Ai driven SME lending platform.
• East Africa based stablecoin startups NedaPay and Rovify won $20K each from Base.

💰 Venture Funds

• African fintechs raised $157 Million in Q2 2025.
• Rally Cap partially exited its investment in South African fintech Stitch after the company's $55 Million Series B round.

🚀 Partnerships & Product Launches

• Nigeria’s Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) launched a real-time portal to track all VAT-eligible electronic transactions and mandated integration from banks, card schemes, fintechs, and payment service providers.
• Luno allowed its users in South Africa to invest in tokenised stocks and exchange-traded funds (ETFs), making global equities like Apple and Alphabet accessible for as little as R20 ($1.13). 
• Visa launched the first data centre in South Africa. 

👔 Leadership Lineup

• Lydia CEO and CTO exited while customers struggled to retrieve funds.

📰 News of the Week

• 54 Collective faced liquidation over misused Mastercard Foundation grant.

The group, originally registered as Africa Founders Ventures, got $42 Million of the grant and allegedly rerouted $4.59M to its for-profit cousin Founders Factory Africa. Then it spent nearly $700,000 on a name change, without permission. Once Mastercard started asking questions, the books suddenly flooded with 2,000+ “adjusting journal entries”, with no audited financial statement.

The 54 Collective liquidation was provisionally ordered by a South African High Court.

👀 Eye Openers

• Eight years ago, someone suggested that an M-Pesa and PayPal partnership needed to happen, and now it’s finally live. M-Pesa integrated PayPal into its super app in Kenya.

📑 Read of the week

• How Mitchell Elegbe Built Nigeria's First Fintech Unicorn 🦄.(thisisbig)

📖 Other News, Reads, and Media

• M-KOPA lawsuit alleged racial disparity in employee equity, firm says claim is baseless.

🎥 VIDEO INTERVIEWS/DISCUSSIONS

• Interview with Ola Oyetayo, co-founder and CEO of Verto, a UK FCA-licensed platform powering billions in B2B cross-border payments across Africa. He shared how he built the company, how to navigate compliance across multiple markets, and Verto’s stablecoin strategy.

🦉 Tweet of the Week

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• This Week In Fintech is hiring; Apply for a Global Operations Manager role and Account Executive role. 

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