F-Squared Podcast
F-Squared Podcast, from Frontier Fintech, explores the business of financial technology in Africa. The show features interviews with founders, executives, investors, and regulators shaping financial services across the continent. It aims to help listeners understand the interconnected nature of Pan-African fintech and spot emerging trends.
Episodes
Why M-Pesa's Next Act Is About More Than Payments - With Epimack Mbeteni
M-Pesa built mobile money's distribution advantage, but Vodacom's next growth phase depends on far more than cash-in and cash-out. Epimack Mbeteni, Chief Commercial Officer of Vodacom Fintech Group, explains how shared platforms, local execution and sector-specific products support a 103 million-customer business—and why Vodacom wants core and non-core fintech revenue to reach a 50/50 split by 203
KSh25 Billion a Month: Kenya’s New Digital Credit Frontier, with Kevin Mutiso
Kenya has broad financial access and a rapidly expanding digital-credit market, yet only a small minority of adults are financially healthy. Kevin Mutiso, Chairman of the Digital Financial Services Association of Kenya, explains how 2022 regulation unlocked capital, larger loan sizes and specialist lending for traders and boda-boda operators. Samora and Kevin examine the long tail beyond Fuliza an
Paga's Tayo Oviosu: Why You Can't Bank a Billion People by Building a Bank
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 infra
Africa Doesn't Have a Dollar Problem. It Has a Plumbing Problem.
African traders earn in Europe and pay in China. Stablecoins are finally solving that triangular liquidity gap — and reshaping how Africa-Asia trade finance works.April Long spent thirteen years inside corridor banking — Standard Chartered, Gulf African Bank, and the Africa-Asia fintech ecosystem. She watched the cost of stablecoin liquidity fall from unworkable to roughly 50 basis points round-tr
Building the Rails for African Trade: Inside Onafriq | Dare Okoudjou
Africa's mobile money networks have over 800 million registered accounts spread across dozens of closed loops. Moving money between them; across borders, currencies, and regulatory jurisdictions, remains the unfinished infrastructure project of a generation. Onafriq was built on the thesis that someone had to connect the dots.Samora Kariuki sits down with Dare Okoudjou, founder and CEO of Onaf
Building Infrastructure That Puts You in Control of Your Money | Farzam Ehsani, Valr
Valr is Africa's largest crypto exchange by volume, but the business has evolved well beyond exchange. Under founder Farzam Ehsani, Valr now provides modular on-chain financial infrastructure that banks and telcos plug into to offer their own customers crypto exposure, stablecoin savings, tokenised assets, and cross-border settlement. In a sector where reputational risk is the norm, the word that
Inside the Bank Building Africa's First Regulated Digital Asset Stack | ABSA CIB
Banks have spent decades building the infrastructure that makes money move. Now, a new set of rails; blockchain, stablecoins, tokenized assets, is being laid alongside those systems. The question isn't whether banks will have to engage with digital assets. It's whether they'll do it in time, and whether they'll do it right.Rob Downes, Nkahiseng Ralepeli, and Robyn Lawson lead the
The Operating System for Stablecoins: Beyond the Crypto Hype | Stone Atwine
For an operator moving millions across borders, Stone Atwine has come to understand where there’s real value to be created and where hype dominates. For him, having built his Fintech chops in a Mobile Money region, the value proposition for Stablecoins became evident almost immediately. Why manage 10 different bank accounts and wait days for SWIFT when you can run a continental treasury from a si
The "Stablecoin Sandwich": How Conduit Fixes Cross-Border Payments
Why does it take five days and $30 to move money from Mexico to the US, or Nigeria to China? In a world of instant communication, the "black hole" of correspondent banking is still swallowing billions in fees and lost time.Kirill Gertmann, CEO of Conduit, is a 20-year fintech veteran who spent years in traditional banking before diving into crypto. After surviving the 2022 DeFi collapse
The Evolution of Nigerian Fintech: Scale, Scars, and Strategy | Olu Akanmu
Why does Nigeria have 120 million people with digital identities but only 70 million with bank accounts? Despite a decade of growth, the "last mile" of financial inclusion remains a stubborn red ocean.Samora Kariuki sits down with Olu Akanmu, a rare leader who has navigated the "commercial battlefield" at the highest levels of telcos, Tier-1 banks, and scale-up fintechs (OPay).
From Car Wash to Exit: How Bente Krogman Built mTek (Acquired by Bolttech)
Insurance penetration in Kenya has hovered at 2% for decades. Why? Because the industry tries to sell annual policies to people who earn daily wages. It’s a relevance problem, not a demand problem.Bente Krogman didn't start in fintech. She grew up in a German village of 300 people, managed mosquito net logistics in Tanzania, and launched a car wash in Nairobi. That grit led her to found M-Tek, an
The "Supply Chain Finance" Myth: Why Retailers Really Need Capital | Fred Njogu
Most banks and fintechs misunderstand the problem at the last mile. They build "Supply Chain Finance" to fund invoices, assuming the sale has happened. But Fred Njogu explains that the real problem is the lost sale: the customer is at the counter, the demand is real, but the shopkeeper didn't have the cash that morning to stock the product.The Story: Fred Njogu, COO of Correlaction,
The "Black Hole" of African Payments: Why One PSP is Never Enough | Jonatan Allback
Why do 30% of transactions in South Africa fail? And more importantly, why do merchants often get nothing but a generic error message when it happens?Jonatan Allback, CEO of Njiapay, joins Samora Kariuki to deconstruct the "black hole" of African payments.The conversation starts with the origin story of Njiapay, originally built as an internal tool to fix low conversion rates for the cal
Weaver Fintech - The Former Catalog Retailer's 8x Fintech Flywheel | Sean Wibberley
How do you build a lending business for a market traditional banks ignore? You don't start with a banking charter. You start with a catalog.Sean Wibberley, CEO of Weaver Fintech, joins Samora Kariuki to share the incredible story of Finchoice. It’s a journey that starts with Home Choice, a catalog retailer, and a brilliant insight from the founder’s daughter: the company’s database of female c
The Accidental Fintech Career: From Malawi to Scaling Chipper Cash & Ebanx | Wiza Jalakasi
How do you build an "accidental" career in fintech? Wiza Jalakasi, famously known as "the African fintech guy" and now Director of African Expansion at Ebanx, joins Samora Kariuki to trace his remarkable journey.It's a story that begins with selling games on floppy disks in Malawi, moves through a failed startup, and lands him at the center of scaling both Africa's Talk
He Resigned After His Mom Said He’d Changed — Building Africa’s Next Fintech Giant.
He resigned from one of the world's largest hedge funds after his mom said he'd changed. Tarek Mouganie’s journey is anything but conventional, taking him from a PhD in material science to the trading floors of London, and back to Ghana to tackle one of the hardest problems on the continent: building a real bank for the African majority.In this episode, Tarek, founder and CEO of Affinity A
The Moment Playbook: Building a Pan-African Fintech with MultiChoice | Joel Yarbrough
In this episode, Samora Kariuki sits down with Joel Yarbrough, CEO of Moment, for a deep dive into the strategy and technology behind one of Africa's most ambitious new fintech ventures.The story of a pan-African fintech is often told through big funding rounds and flashy app features. But this narrative skips the most important part: the "unsexy," foundational work required to build
The Untold Story of M-Pesa: How Was It Really Built? | Catherine Karimi Gichunge
In this episode, Samora Kariuki sits down with Catherine Karimi Gichunge, a member of the original M-Pesa team, for a deep dive into the untold story of how Africa's most iconic fintech was really built.The M-Pesa story is often told like a myth, a brilliant innovation that grew "organically" into a billion-dollar behemoth. But this narrative skips the most important part: the messy,
Mike Hudack on Making Global Money Movement Instant, Free, and Social
What if sending money across the world was as simple, free, and instant as making a phone call? In this episode, Samora Kariuki sits down with Mike Hudack, CEO of Sling, to discuss how his company is using stablecoins and blockchain technology to build a global,social financial network that moves beyond the friction of traditional banking.Topics covered include:● The future of money is on-chain an
AJ Davidson & Aum Thacker on the Playbook for Building a Fundable Credit Business in Africa.
What does it really take to build a lending business that can attract millions in institutional debt in Africa? In this episode, Samora Kariuki sits down with credit experts AJ Davidson (Sixpoint Capital) and Aum Thacker (TLG Capital) to lay out the practical playbook of do's, don'ts, and non-negotiables.Topics covered include:● Why your lending model needs built-in enforceability to survive.● T
Rinse Jacobs on Building a Financial Platform for Africa's SMEs
What does it take to build a digital bank that truly solves the problems of small businesses in Africa? In this episode, Samora Kariuki sits down with Rinse Jacobs, CEO of Zazu, a neobank moving beyond the account and card to build the foundational financial hub for Africa's entrepreneurs.Topics covered include:● Why traditional banking consistently fails the modern SME;● The "rebundli
Ola Oyetayo on Building Licensed Cross-Border Payments for Africa
What does it take to build an enterprise-grade cross-border payments platform across Africa? In this episode, Samora Kariuki sits down with Ola Oyetayo, CEO of Verto—a licensed B2B payments platform moving billions monthly with corridor-level precision.Topics covered include:FX liquidity gaps and price discovery across African marketsWhy compliance is a growth enabler, not a bottleneckThe operatio
Rebuilding Africa’s Tech Stack: Kamal Budhabhatti on Voice, AI, and the Future of Little
What happens when one of Africa’s top engineers sets out to rebuild a fintech and mobility platform—this time using AI?In this episode of the F-Squared Podcast, Samora Kariuki sits down with Kamal Budhabhatti, CEO of Little, to unpack how he’s applying LLMs, voice commands, and platform-first thinking to transform the next phase of African digital infrastructure. This is a deep dive into technical
Eric Muriuki on M-Shwari, Fuliza & Building Africa’s Next Fintech Platform
M-Shwari scaled to 15 million users in 41 days. Fuliza became a verb. Now, Eric Muriuki is building Loop DFS into the Stripe of Africa.In this episode of F-Squared, Samora Kariuki goes deep with one of Africa’s most experienced digital finance leaders. They unpack:The legal architecture behind M-Pesa’s riseWhat went wrong—and right—with M-Shwari’s launchHow Fuliza went from pitch to cultural pheno
Rewiring African Payments: Obi Emeratom on Zone, Blockchain, and the Future of Regulated DeFi
In this episode, I sit down with Obi Emeratom, the founder and CEO of Zone, to explore how his company is rebuilding the core infrastructure of African payments using a regulated, blockchain-based architecture.We unpack:The journey from Appzone to Zone and why the spin-off was necessaryHow Zone won over Nigerian banks without evangelizing cryptoWhat makes regulated blockchains credible to central
Stablecoins in Africa: What’s Real, What’s Not
What if moving money across borders was as seamless as sending an email?In this episode of the F-Squared Podcast, host Samora sits down with Eytan Messika (Nilos) and Nicolai Eddy (Nala & Rafiki) to unpack stablecoins in the African context—from FX innovation and liquidity provisioning to the regulatory frictions shaping adoption.🔍 What’s inside:Why correspondent banking is outdated for fronti
This changed everything for Stitch
South Africa’s payments scene looks “solved” from the outside—until you try to wire money 50 times a day from your phone. In this candid conversation, Kiaan Pillay, CEO & co-founder of Stitch, sits down with Samora Kariuki to unpack how a scrappy side-project became the enterprise payments partner for Binance, Vodacom, Foschini Group, and more.You’ll hear:The origin story: screen-scraping bank
Beyond Banking and Lending – The Story of Carbon So Far with Ngozi Dozie
In this engaging episode of the Frontier Fintech podcast, host Samora Kariuki sits down with Ngozi Dozie, co-founder of Carbon, to unpack the untapped potential of Nigeria’s lending market. Despite Nigeria’s status as one of Africa’s largest economies, only 2–5% of its population accessed loans annually a decade ago. Ngozi reveals how Carbon seized this opportunity, starting with paper-based salar
The Story Behind Kenya’s Most Ambitious Banking Transformation
70% of digital transformations in banks fail. The odds are even worse when you're pivoting from a niche corporate bank to a universal, tech-driven institution. But I&M Bank has bucked the trend.In this episode, we sit down with Shameer Patel, Executive General Manager of Retail and Business Banking at I&M Bank. Shameer was instrumental in architecting I&M’s transformation—first fro
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