[Transcript] #18: Flutterwave - From Y Combinator to becoming one of Africa’s largest FinTech platforms
Transcript for podcast originally recorded on December 13, 2020
😉 Hello Afrobility readers and listeners!
Back in December 2020, we discussed Flutterwave, the payments infra tech platform and one of the most prominent startups in Africa.
Flutterwave has experienced a range of emotions and faced numerous negative press cycles in 2022 and 2023. I'll be closely monitoring their developments to see where they stand in the future 😉
Enjoy & DFTBA!
Olumide Ogunsanwo
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Transcript starts here
[00:00:00] Olumide Ogunsanwo: Welcome to Afrobility, a conversation about African business and technology. Today we're going to talk about Flutterwave, the African payments infrastructure company. We'll give some context of the Nigerian payment sector before 2014. We'll discuss Flutterwave's founding and early history. We'll also talk about its place in the broader payments ecosystem. And then we'll finally end with our views on its future outlook. This episode was recorded on December 13, 2020. Bankidub. How goes it?
[00:00:30] Bankole Makanju: I'm good. I like Bankidub. I'm good. I'm looking forward to the holidays. Not thinking about work for a few days. Those few days have not been this coming week. Cause I will be thinking about work, but yeah, looking forward to it. Should be great. How are you?
[00:00:40] Olumide Ogunsanwo: I'm feeling better. I have had a stomach ache for the past couple of days, but I'm mostly better. Not back to full form, but I'm alive enough to do this podcast.
[00:00:49] Bankole Makanju: It's all the goods. Seafood, Mexican food you're having in Miami.
[00:00:53] Olumide Ogunsanwo: Eww, I don't think so. I doubt it. two quick things before we start a quick reminder about our mailing list. So if you go to Afrobility. com and you click on subscribe, you can join our mailing list and yeah, we'll send emails once in a while with potentially interesting stuff.
Second thing to note is we didn't mention this last week or actually two weeks ago, we're actually doing a trilogy of payments companies. So two weeks ago it was Interswitch. Today's going to be Flutterwave. And then two weeks from now we'll be, we'll be Paystack.
[00:01:18] Bankole Makanju: Yeah, that should be fun. I'm looking forward to talking about that. As we did the research, because they're contiguous, we're starting to see things that are similar or different in each of these companies.
[00:01:29] Olumide Ogunsanwo: If you really like payments infra, you'll probably like all these episodes. Cool. So, Flutterwave is basically a payment infra company that enables businesses accept and process payments online. When businesses integrate with Flutterwave's API. They can get payments from cards, mobile money, wallets, or bank accounts. So it's a pretty important company because it's solving a fundamental issue. It's an enabler for the tech ecosystem and it's one of the larger private companies based on the most recent valuation. So it's a big deal.