Flutterwave CEO Details Future Plans
The future of Africa’s digital marketplace is on the horizon, and Flutterwave CEO Olugbenga “GB” Agboola is on the front lines of shaping it.
The founder and leader of Africa’s premier e-payments platform recently outlined plans for the coming year in a company blog post. Those plans focus on ways his company can support the continent’s people on a journey toward greater digital literacy, opportunities, and prosperity.
As the founder and leader of Africa’s most valuable startup (valued at more than $3 billion in 2022), the Flutterwave CEO believes Africa can and will play a leading role in the 21st century’s economy.
“As a home to over 500 million young people with growing digital literacy and disposable income, we must continue to support Africa economies and their people to do more in this digital age,” he wrote. “We believe so much in the possibilities that we want to continue to make it easier for this to happen and for African giants like Air Peace to expand seamlessly across Africa.”
The Year Ahead for Flutterwave
According to Agboola, Flutterwave’s priorities for this year will include a return to its roots through a renewed commitment to enterprise clients.
When the company first launched in 2016, the Flutterwave CEO envisioned his product as a simple means to an end. Having recently returned to his native Nigeria to work in the financial sector, Agboola saw the problems enterprise businesses were facing trying to operate in multiple countries. He realized that his technical expertise could work to fix some of the most significant pain points for big businesses across the continent.
To solve the problems, he drew on his experiences working at the forefront of digital banking, which includes tours of duty at both Google Wallet and PayPal, making Agboola more than familiar with the potential of e-payment systems.
Moving money across national borders used to take time. Waiting on payments for goods or wages frequently meant projects took longer than necessary and exceeded budget. Flutterwave was founded to tackle those problems.
But it became much more.
Now, the Flutterwave CEO has slated the current year as a time to do more for large-scale businesses that, he believes, can help transform Africa for the better.
“Enabling the expansion of multinational companies like Uber into and within African countries helps create alternative sources of income and knowledge transfer, which could have boundless and exponential growth effects on the continent in all sectors,” he wrote.
Making it easier for global companies to operate in Africa will bring both opportunities and investments to places in need of economic jolts. With ride-sharing and delivery apps, more African people can participate in the gig economy. Even better, every job created will have spillover effects that enrich the digital ecosystem of the continent, according to Agboola.
Getting Personal
In addition to doubling down on serving enterprise clients, the Flutterwave CEO wants to expand the services of one of the company’s most used products: the Send app, the brand’s remittance solution.
Built to help Africans worldwide easily send money back home (or receive money from friends and relatives), Send primarily operates in North America and Europe.
This year, Agboola hopes to extend the product’s reach.
At the end of 2023, Send had full licenses in 13 U.S. states and reached within 29, but the Flutterwave CEO believes his company’s destiny is to stretch from the country’s East Coast to its Western shores.
As he works to make Send App available to users in all 50 states, Agboola is also pushing to get the app approved in other global destinations, ensuring that more members of the African diaspora can access its features.
“We will also deepen our reach in the rest of North America and countries in the Middle East and Asia,” he wrote. “People have used the app for various cases like planning their marriages and supporting loved ones. We plan to make this app available to as many people that need it as possible in 2024.”
The popularity of the Send app led Flutterwave to design other applications, like Tuition and Swap, that serve similar but more targeted African purposes. Through these platforms, Africans can pay out-of-country school fees in different currencies without waiting days or even working for conversions to process.
A Formidable Spirit
If the company’s plans seem optimistic, it’s because they reflect the spirit of the Flutterwave CEO. Agboola doesn’t simply want his company to grow; he wants Africa to prosper.
“Africans have been historically excluded from the global payments system — paying and getting paid across African countries and the world is still a hassle for most,” he noted. “One of the reasons we exist is to solve this problem, and in 2023, we announced some key relationships that would bring us closer to our goal.”
Those relationships included the company’s work with Audiomack, which resulted in a digital platform that allowed African artists to monetize their work, and its partnership with African entertainment leaders to help bolster the continent’s creative pursuits.
Flutterwave also worked with the International Air Transport Association to help Africans become more comfortable paying for international flights with their local currencies — something that’s prevented many people from enjoying the stimulating benefits of travel.
As CEO of Flutterwave, Agboola hopes to use his platform to continue to bolster opportunities for Africans in the coming year and beyond.
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