Nigeria’s Fintech Leaders Tackle Borderless Payments

The Nigerian fintech ecosystem turned out in force for the first edition of The Borderless Experience by Condia.

The Borderless Experience, a conference focused on the infrastructure, regulation, and partnerships needed to make cross-border payments and commerce work more seamlessly across Africa.

The conference attracted participants nationwide, including leaders and practitioners across payments, banking, fintech, regulation, compliance, commerce, travel, hospitality, and related infrastructure.

The high-level industry event was a deep dive into how payments have evolved into the fundamental operating layer for global travel, commerce, and logistics in Africa. The 2026 edition took place on Friday, August 21, at the Landmark Event Centre in Lagos, Nigeria.

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Solving Africa’s Cross-border Challenges

Organized by Condia, a leading Africa-focused tech publication, the event addressed a structural shift in African connectivity, where cross-border movement and trade are at record highs. This surge has exposed critical friction points in current infrastructure, including card declines, FX volatility, and fragmented settlement systems. The program examined the infrastructure, partnerships, and regulation behind Africa’s increasingly connected economy.

The conversations covered fintech, payments & financial infrastructure, commerce, travel & hospitality, policy, trust & regulation, and more. In her keynote address, Ricky Asemota, a partner at McKinsey & Company, argued that the real test facing fast-growing companies is not whether they can generate new ideas but whether they can hold on to the ones they already have. “The capability that is proportionately valuable is not the ability to create new ideas; it’s going to be the ability to absorb them.” 

Expanding into new markets and attracting investment are often treated as milestones. Asemota argues they are really stress tests. The real challenge isn’t gaining access to customers or capital, but building an organization that can maintain its standards as it scales.

Some of the dignitaries who graced the event include Kemi Manuel, CEO of Zest Payments; Akeem Lawal, Divisional Chief Executive Officer of Interswitch’s Payment Processing and Switching business; Oladipo Alabede, Divisional Head, Payments, FCMB; Richard Oyome, Co-founder and COO, Raenest; Joshua Chibueze, Co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer at Piggyvest; Dr Ola Brown, Founder and General Partner, HealthCap Africa, and others.

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Conversations at The Conference

In one of the panel sessions titled “The African Consumer is Already Borderless. And So Is Their Money: Earning, saving, and investing across currencies, including stablecoins.” One of the panelists, Richard Oyome, co-founder of Raenest, said, “It is time to broaden our focus to the overall business since there is significant demand from everyday consumers, not only from freelancers or people living in the diaspora who wish to send money home.”

During a separate fireside chat at The Borderless Experience, a speaker made a striking claim. According to Akeem Lawal, Divisional Chief Executive Officer of Interswitch’s Payment Processing and Switching business, roughly $100 billion in digital assets exit Nigeria for other parts of the world without any trace.

Nigeria’s financial services sector has changed significantly since the early 2000s. The sector has grown significantly, shifting from a mostly manual period when even branches within the same bank could not connect to one another to a time when nearly every licensed financial institution can do so without issue.

“The problem today that I see, and that Interswitch is trying to solve, is that we now need to take the sophistication we have created in Nigeria and expand it outside of Nigeria,” he said, describing a future where a Nigerian card works seamlessly in Ghana or South Africa and a Nigerian mobile wallet can be used to pay a retailer in Kenya.

This is the backdrop against the $100 billion claim. If that volume of value is already crossing African borders through channels that lack formal licensing, Lawal argued, it shows the market existed long before any regulated infrastructure was built to support it.

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The Borderless Experience is the first in a series of Condia gatherings designed to give founders and operators direct access to the people building the financial infrastructure they depend on, rather than conference programming built around pitch competitions or general networking.