When Paga co-founder Tayo Oviosu sat down recently to reflect on his company’s seventeen-year journey building fintech in Africa, he offered insights that directly challenge the playbook that has defined the industry for the past decade. In an industry where aggressive expansion and growth-at-all-costs mentality dominated, Paga’s survival through two decades of macroeconomic turbulence, regulatory uncertainty, and competitive chaos tells a different story about what actually keeps fintech companies alive.
The company’s most consequential decision came early: refusing to enter the card-gateway war that produced African fintech darlings Paystack and Flutterwave. Oviosu was direct about the reasoning. Nigeria was never fundamentally a card-first market, and competing in an already crowded, capital-intensive segment would have diverted resources from where Paga had genuine competitive advantage. Strategy, he explained, is largely about deciding what not to pursue. While competitors burned millions chasing market share in card payments, Paga concentrated on alternative payment rails and alternative infrastructure, a decision that looked unambitious at the time but kept the company profitable and focused.
This disciplined approach birthed what Oviosu calls the “Paga Engine” thesis. Rather than remaining purely consumer-facing, Paga evolved into infrastructure, becoming the backend systems that let banks, wallets, retailers, and other businesses embed financial services into their own platforms. This shift transformed Paga from a fintech competing for customers into a utility enabling the broader ecosystem, a subtle but fundamental difference that shaped everything that followed.
Oviosu also pushed back on industry consensus that agent banking in Nigeria is maturing and near-saturation. He sees it differently. Agent banking is a twenty-year business, he argued, pointing to evidence that approximately eighty percent of transactions through agents are still cash withdrawals. Despite years of digitization efforts across Nigeria, cash remains deeply embedded in everyday commerce. That reality means agent networks are not disappearing anytime soon, and companies positioned in that infrastructure maintain real value.
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Perhaps his sharpest position addressed what actually keeps fintech companies alive. Revenue is a vanity metric, Oviosu said. Gross profit is what keeps businesses alive. This was a direct rebuke of the funding boom mentality where companies posted impressive top-line numbers while quietly destroying value through weak unit economics. He noted that while Paga could have distributed POS terminals at little or no cost to chase rapid customer acquisition like competitors, it deliberately chose a different path, prioritizing healthy margins and cash-flow sustainability over headline growth figures.
This philosophy extended to how Paga views competition. Rather than treating companies like OPay and PalmPay purely as threats, Oviosu said Paga increasingly pursues collaboration and integration across the ecosystem. This approach feels natural for a company that positioned itself as infrastructure meant to empower the broader financial system rather than dominate the consumer market outright.
As African fintech shifts from a decade defined by aggressive growth to one increasingly focused on sustainability and profitability, Paga’s seventeen-year bet on patience is starting to look less like caution and more like foresight. In a continent where most fintech startups do not survive their third year, simply lasting is rare. Building to last while remaining profitable may be the rarest achievement of all.
