Africa’s fintech ecosystem has evolved rapidly over the last five years, moving from consumer-focused payment apps to deeper financial infrastructure powering businesses across the continent.

At the centre of this transformation are Banking as a Service (BaaS) providers building the rails that enable cross border payments, embedded finance, compliance, and digital commerce.

One of the companies positioning itself at the heart of this infrastructure play is Maplerad, the fintech startup formerly known as Wirepay.

Since pivoting from a consumer payments platform into a BaaS provider, the company says it has processed more than $500 million in transactions while helping businesses scale financial services across African markets.

In this interview with Nairametrics, Founder and CEO of Maplerad, Obinna Chukwujioke, speaks on the challenges slowing cross border payments in Africa, the future of banking infrastructure, the changing funding environment for startups, and why interoperability will determine the success of Africa’s digital commerce ambitions.

Nairametrics: Tell us about your journey into fintech and what motivated you into doing what you have been doing. 

Obinna Chukwujioke: My journey into fintech standardly began where most operator stories do: at the intersection of friction and frustration. Building and managing businesses in emerging markets forces you to confront a hard truth, money simply does not move as smoothly as it should.

The deeper I got into the ecosystem, the more I realized that every brilliant consumer tech or commerce idea was ultimately getting choked by the underlying financial rails.

What motivates me every day is the leverage of infrastructure. When you build a great consumer app, you help thousands; when you build robust financial infrastructure, you unlock the potential for thousands of other businesses to serve millions.

Nairametrics: Banking infrastructure is often described as the “rails” of fintech. What gaps in Africa’s financial infrastructure still need urgent attention today? 

Obinna Chukwujioke: While we have done an incredible job with localized real time domestic payments especially in markets like Nigeria, the cross-border rails are still incredibly fragmented. The most urgent gap is local currency liquidity clearing and settlement across regions.

Right now, moving money between two neighboring African countries too often requires routing through a global currency like converting to dollars or stablecoins and back to local currency. That is inefficient and expensive.

We also need deeper infrastructure for automated compliance and identity verification that works dynamically across different legal jurisdictions.

Nairametrics: Maplerad has evolved from Wirepay into a Banking as a Service platform powering hundreds of businesses. What problem were you originally trying to solve, and how has that vision evolved over the years? 

Obinna Chukwujioke: When we started with Wirepay, the focus was highly immediate: solving cross border payment friction for users who needed to transact globally without the traditional bottlenecks. It was a classic consumer facing solution.

But as we scaled, an interesting thing happened. Other businesses started reaching out, asking if they could license or use the engine we had built underneath to power their platforms. That was our lightbulb moment. We realized that instead of just building the house, we should be manufacturing the bricks and mortar.

The vision evolved from being a standalone digital wallet into becoming the complete institutional backbone, the Banking as a Service infrastructure that allows any company, whether it is a gig economy platform, a remittance app or a retail giant, to embed financial services seamlessly.

Nairametrics: Maplerad has processed over $500 million in transactions. What have been the biggest lessons from building financial infrastructure at scale across multiple African markets? 

Obinna Chukwujioke: First, there is no such thing as a single African market. Every country is a unique puzzle of consumer behavior, banking partnerships, and regulatory expectations.

Second, redundancy is everything. When you are the infrastructure layer, you cannot afford downtime. If a consumer app goes down, it is an inconvenience; if your infrastructure goes down, hundreds of businesses halt.

You quickly learn to build deep, multilayered redundancies with local banks and settlement networks so that the system gracefully routes around failures without the end merchant ever noticing.

 Nairametrics: How do you balance the need for innovation with the regulatory and compliance requirements that come with providing financial infrastructure services? 

Obinna Chukwujioke: You stop viewing compliance as a hurdle and start viewing it as a competitive advantage. In infrastructure, if you move fast and break things, you get shut down.

We have adopted a philosophy of proactive engagement. We build compliance like robust KYC, AML, and transaction monitoring directly into our product architecture from day one. By being a transparent, cooperative partner to regulators, we build the trust required to innovate safely.

True innovation is not about bypassing the rules; it is about using technology to meet the spirit of the rules more efficiently than legacy systems ever could.

Nairametrics: What differentiates Maplerad from the growing number of fintech infrastructure providers operating across Africa? 

Obinna Chukwujioke: It comes down to execution depth and product stability. Many players offer APIs that act as thin wrappers over legacy bank systems, meaning the underlying fragility is still there.

At Maplerad, we have spent years building deep, direct relationships with tier one clearing banks and regulatory bodies to ensure our infrastructure is genuinely robust.

We do not just provide an API endpoint; we provide a fully compliant, highly resilient infrastructure layer that manages the heavy lifting of compliance, licensing architecture, and liquidity management, letting founders focus strictly on their core product.

Nairametrics: Despite initiatives such as the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), cross border payments remain complex. What are the biggest bottlenecks preventing seamless commerce across Africa? 

Obinna Chukwujioke: The absolute biggest bottleneck is foreign exchange fragmentation and liquidity.

It is the difficulty of sourcing and clearing local currencies efficiently without relying on a hard currency intermediary like the US dollar.

Beyond that, you have misaligned regulatory frameworks. What is permissible in one region might require a completely different tier of licensing just a few miles across the border.

Until we harmonize these regulatory standards and embrace multicurrency settlement rails, macro initiatives like AfCFTA will struggle to hit their full velocity.

Nairametrics: What does a truly unified African commerce ecosystem look like in the next decade? 

Obinna Chukwujioke: A truly unified ecosystem means a merchant in Lagos can list a product online, and a consumer in Accra can buy it instantly using their local payment method, with settlement happening in hours, not weeks, and at a fraction of today’s cost.

It looks like borderless logistics paired with borderless finance. In the next decade, the friction of operating across different African countries should completely fade into the background, making expanding from one market to five feel as seamless as expanding from one city to another.

Nairametrics: How important is interoperability between payment platforms, banks, fintechs, and regulators in achieving a unified African market? 

Obinna Chukwujioke: It is the entire game. Without interoperability, you do not have an ecosystem; you just have a collection of digital islands.

A merchant using a fintech wallet in Nairobi should be able to instantly pay a supplier using a traditional bank account in Lagos, with the regulator having real time visibility into the compliance data.

Interoperability lowers the cost of transaction routing, eliminates closed loop monopolies, and creates the massive network effects required to make intra African commerce viable at scale. This is what we are building at Maplerad.

Nairametrics: What role will fintech infrastructure companies like Maplerad play in accelerating intra African trade and digital commerce? 

Obinna Chukwujioke: We are the invisible enablement layer. Maplerad handles the massive complexity of localized integrations, FX clearing, and compliance rails so businesses do not have to spend years and millions of dollars building them from scratch.

By lowering the barrier to entry for cross border expansion, we allow a new generation of digital platforms, ecommerce giants, and enterprises to scale instantly across the continent. We do the heavy engineering so they can focus on driving trade.

Nairametrics: Nigeria remains Africa’s most active fintech market. How would you assess the current state of the industry and its evolution over the past five years? 

Obinna Chukwujioke: The last five years have been a huge learning experience. We moved away from a crazy time when everyone was throwing money at everything, and we entered a phase where companies have to be careful, practical, and highly disciplined.

At first, the goal was just to figure out the basics like how to connect systems and move money. Now, the industry is entering a more advanced phase. It is no longer just about transferring cash; it is about providing smarter financial services like lending, wealth management, and software for businesses.

The hype is gone, and the people still standing are strong, experienced, and ready for the real work.

Nairametrics: Investor sentiment toward African startups has shifted in recent years. How are fintech founders adapting to a more disciplined funding environment? 

Obinna Chukwujioke: Founders have completely rewritten their playbooks. The era of optimizing for top line transaction volume at all costs is over. Today, the metric that matters is unit economics and path to profitability.

We are seeing founders become incredibly lean, focusing heavily on core product value, customer retention, and sustainable monetization.

It is a healthy shift. The businesses being built in this disciplined funding environment are fundamentally stronger, more capital efficient, and built to last.

Nairametrics: We are seeing increased regulatory engagement in the fintech sector. Do you believe current regulations are helping innovation or creating new challenges for startups? 

Obinna Chukwujioke: It is a bit of both, which is natural for a maturing market. Increased regulatory engagement can feel restrictive initially, but it actually brings much needed legitimacy and stability to the sector.

It sifts out bad actors and gives institutional partners the confidence to collaborate with fintechs. The challenge arises when regulations are reactive rather than collaborative.

As long as regulators keep an open channel with operators to understand the nuances of technologies like Banking as a Service and digital assets, this guard railed environment will ultimately protect the ecosystem and help it scale sustainably.

Nairametrics: Which fintech sub sectors do you believe are currently underserved and present the biggest opportunities for growth in Nigeria? 

Obinna Chukwujioke: B2B corporate banking and treasury management are massive opportunities.

While consumer payments are highly competitive, the way businesses manage their liquidity, multicurrency corporate cards, and payroll across regions is still surprisingly manual.

Additionally, trade finance remains heavily underserved. There is a massive credit gap for SMEs trying to import or export goods, and infrastructure that can accurately assess risk and provide liquidity will capture enormous value.

Nairametrics: How do you see the relationship between traditional banks and fintech companies evolving over the next few years? 

Obinna Chukwujioke: We have completely moved past the old narrative of fintech versus banks. The relationship has evolved into a deeply symbiotic partnership.

Traditional banks possess the balance sheets, regulatory longevity, and trust, while fintechs possess the agility, product design depth, and distribution speed.

Moving forward, you will see banks increasingly acting as the foundational ledger layer, while infrastructure platforms like Maplerad abstract that complexity to deliver it to the market. It is an era of co-opetition and deep integration.

Nairametrics: As someone who mentors founders both in Africa and internationally, what common mistakes do you see fintech entrepreneurs making when trying to scale their businesses? 

Obinna Chukwujioke: The most common mistake founders make is trying to grow their business too fast before they have proven that people actually want what they are selling.

In fintech, it is easy to get tricked. If a company spends a ton of money on marketing discounts, lots of people will use the product. But that high activity is driven by the discounts, not by real demand.

Founders often try to expand into other countries before they have even figured out how to make a profit or handle the complicated laws in their own backyard.

My advice is always the same: perfect your business model first. Make sure your systems can actually make a profit, and then copy that success step by step in new places.

Nairametrics: Looking ahead, what is your long term vision for Maplerad, and what role do you hope the company will play in shaping the future of African commerce and financial infrastructure? 

Obinna Chukwujioke: Our long-term vision is to be the definitive operating system for commerce on the continent. I want Maplerad to be the infrastructure that people do not even have to think about because it just works flawlessly in the background.

Whether it is a global enterprise entering Africa for the first time or a local startup scaling globally, we want Maplerad to be the engine under the hood. Ultimately, we hope to look back and see that we played a foundational role in permanently closing the cross border trade gap and turning Africa into a genuinely unified economic powerhouse.

Other News

Africa’s fintech ecosystem has evolved rapidly over the last five years, moving from consumer-focused payment apps to deeper financial infrastructure powering businesses across the continent.

At the centre of this transformation are Banking as a Service (BaaS) providers building the rails that enable cross border payments, embedded finance, compliance, and digital commerce.

One of the companies positioning itself at the heart of this infrastructure play is Maplerad, the fintech startup formerly known as Wirepay.

Since pivoting from a consumer payments platform into a BaaS provider, the company says it has processed more than $500 million in transactions while helping businesses scale financial services across African markets.

In this interview with Nairametrics, Founder and CEO of Maplerad, Obinna Chukwujioke, speaks on the challenges slowing cross border payments in Africa, the future of banking infrastructure, the changing funding environment for startups, and why interoperability will determine the success of Africa’s digital commerce ambitions.

Nairametrics: Tell us about your journey into fintech and what motivated you into doing what you have been doing. 

Obinna Chukwujioke: My journey into fintech standardly began where most operator stories do: at the intersection of friction and frustration. Building and managing businesses in emerging markets forces you to confront a hard truth, money simply does not move as smoothly as it should.

The deeper I got into the ecosystem, the more I realized that every brilliant consumer tech or commerce idea was ultimately getting choked by the underlying financial rails.

What motivates me every day is the leverage of infrastructure. When you build a great consumer app, you help thousands; when you build robust financial infrastructure, you unlock the potential for thousands of other businesses to serve millions.

Nairametrics: Banking infrastructure is often described as the “rails” of fintech. What gaps in Africa’s financial infrastructure still need urgent attention today? 

Obinna Chukwujioke: While we have done an incredible job with localized real time domestic payments especially in markets like Nigeria, the cross-border rails are still incredibly fragmented. The most urgent gap is local currency liquidity clearing and settlement across regions.

Right now, moving money between two neighboring African countries too often requires routing through a global currency like converting to dollars or stablecoins and back to local currency. That is inefficient and expensive.

We also need deeper infrastructure for automated compliance and identity verification that works dynamically across different legal jurisdictions.

Nairametrics: Maplerad has evolved from Wirepay into a Banking as a Service platform powering hundreds of businesses. What problem were you originally trying to solve, and how has that vision evolved over the years? 

Obinna Chukwujioke: When we started with Wirepay, the focus was highly immediate: solving cross border payment friction for users who needed to transact globally without the traditional bottlenecks. It was a classic consumer facing solution.

But as we scaled, an interesting thing happened. Other businesses started reaching out, asking if they could license or use the engine we had built underneath to power their platforms. That was our lightbulb moment. We realized that instead of just building the house, we should be manufacturing the bricks and mortar.

The vision evolved from being a standalone digital wallet into becoming the complete institutional backbone, the Banking as a Service infrastructure that allows any company, whether it is a gig economy platform, a remittance app or a retail giant, to embed financial services seamlessly.

Nairametrics: Maplerad has processed over $500 million in transactions. What have been the biggest lessons from building financial infrastructure at scale across multiple African markets? 

Obinna Chukwujioke: First, there is no such thing as a single African market. Every country is a unique puzzle of consumer behavior, banking partnerships, and regulatory expectations.

Second, redundancy is everything. When you are the infrastructure layer, you cannot afford downtime. If a consumer app goes down, it is an inconvenience; if your infrastructure goes down, hundreds of businesses halt.

You quickly learn to build deep, multilayered redundancies with local banks and settlement networks so that the system gracefully routes around failures without the end merchant ever noticing.

 Nairametrics: How do you balance the need for innovation with the regulatory and compliance requirements that come with providing financial infrastructure services? 

Obinna Chukwujioke: You stop viewing compliance as a hurdle and start viewing it as a competitive advantage. In infrastructure, if you move fast and break things, you get shut down.

We have adopted a philosophy of proactive engagement. We build compliance like robust KYC, AML, and transaction monitoring directly into our product architecture from day one. By being a transparent, cooperative partner to regulators, we build the trust required to innovate safely.

True innovation is not about bypassing the rules; it is about using technology to meet the spirit of the rules more efficiently than legacy systems ever could.

Nairametrics: What differentiates Maplerad from the growing number of fintech infrastructure providers operating across Africa? 

Obinna Chukwujioke: It comes down to execution depth and product stability. Many players offer APIs that act as thin wrappers over legacy bank systems, meaning the underlying fragility is still there.

At Maplerad, we have spent years building deep, direct relationships with tier one clearing banks and regulatory bodies to ensure our infrastructure is genuinely robust.

We do not just provide an API endpoint; we provide a fully compliant, highly resilient infrastructure layer that manages the heavy lifting of compliance, licensing architecture, and liquidity management, letting founders focus strictly on their core product.

Nairametrics: Despite initiatives such as the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), cross border payments remain complex. What are the biggest bottlenecks preventing seamless commerce across Africa? 

Obinna Chukwujioke: The absolute biggest bottleneck is foreign exchange fragmentation and liquidity.

It is the difficulty of sourcing and clearing local currencies efficiently without relying on a hard currency intermediary like the US dollar.

Beyond that, you have misaligned regulatory frameworks. What is permissible in one region might require a completely different tier of licensing just a few miles across the border.

Until we harmonize these regulatory standards and embrace multicurrency settlement rails, macro initiatives like AfCFTA will struggle to hit their full velocity.

Nairametrics: What does a truly unified African commerce ecosystem look like in the next decade? 

Obinna Chukwujioke: A truly unified ecosystem means a merchant in Lagos can list a product online, and a consumer in Accra can buy it instantly using their local payment method, with settlement happening in hours, not weeks, and at a fraction of today’s cost.

It looks like borderless logistics paired with borderless finance. In the next decade, the friction of operating across different African countries should completely fade into the background, making expanding from one market to five feel as seamless as expanding from one city to another.

Nairametrics: How important is interoperability between payment platforms, banks, fintechs, and regulators in achieving a unified African market? 

Obinna Chukwujioke: It is the entire game. Without interoperability, you do not have an ecosystem; you just have a collection of digital islands.

A merchant using a fintech wallet in Nairobi should be able to instantly pay a supplier using a traditional bank account in Lagos, with the regulator having real time visibility into the compliance data.

Interoperability lowers the cost of transaction routing, eliminates closed loop monopolies, and creates the massive network effects required to make intra African commerce viable at scale. This is what we are building at Maplerad.

Nairametrics: What role will fintech infrastructure companies like Maplerad play in accelerating intra African trade and digital commerce? 

Obinna Chukwujioke: We are the invisible enablement layer. Maplerad handles the massive complexity of localized integrations, FX clearing, and compliance rails so businesses do not have to spend years and millions of dollars building them from scratch.

By lowering the barrier to entry for cross border expansion, we allow a new generation of digital platforms, ecommerce giants, and enterprises to scale instantly across the continent. We do the heavy engineering so they can focus on driving trade.

Nairametrics: Nigeria remains Africa’s most active fintech market. How would you assess the current state of the industry and its evolution over the past five years? 

Obinna Chukwujioke: The last five years have been a huge learning experience. We moved away from a crazy time when everyone was throwing money at everything, and we entered a phase where companies have to be careful, practical, and highly disciplined.

At first, the goal was just to figure out the basics like how to connect systems and move money. Now, the industry is entering a more advanced phase. It is no longer just about transferring cash; it is about providing smarter financial services like lending, wealth management, and software for businesses.

The hype is gone, and the people still standing are strong, experienced, and ready for the real work.

Nairametrics: Investor sentiment toward African startups has shifted in recent years. How are fintech founders adapting to a more disciplined funding environment? 

Obinna Chukwujioke: Founders have completely rewritten their playbooks. The era of optimizing for top line transaction volume at all costs is over. Today, the metric that matters is unit economics and path to profitability.

We are seeing founders become incredibly lean, focusing heavily on core product value, customer retention, and sustainable monetization.

It is a healthy shift. The businesses being built in this disciplined funding environment are fundamentally stronger, more capital efficient, and built to last.

Nairametrics: We are seeing increased regulatory engagement in the fintech sector. Do you believe current regulations are helping innovation or creating new challenges for startups? 

Obinna Chukwujioke: It is a bit of both, which is natural for a maturing market. Increased regulatory engagement can feel restrictive initially, but it actually brings much needed legitimacy and stability to the sector.

It sifts out bad actors and gives institutional partners the confidence to collaborate with fintechs. The challenge arises when regulations are reactive rather than collaborative.

As long as regulators keep an open channel with operators to understand the nuances of technologies like Banking as a Service and digital assets, this guard railed environment will ultimately protect the ecosystem and help it scale sustainably.

Nairametrics: Which fintech sub sectors do you believe are currently underserved and present the biggest opportunities for growth in Nigeria? 

Obinna Chukwujioke: B2B corporate banking and treasury management are massive opportunities.

While consumer payments are highly competitive, the way businesses manage their liquidity, multicurrency corporate cards, and payroll across regions is still surprisingly manual.

Additionally, trade finance remains heavily underserved. There is a massive credit gap for SMEs trying to import or export goods, and infrastructure that can accurately assess risk and provide liquidity will capture enormous value.

Nairametrics: How do you see the relationship between traditional banks and fintech companies evolving over the next few years? 

Obinna Chukwujioke: We have completely moved past the old narrative of fintech versus banks. The relationship has evolved into a deeply symbiotic partnership.

Traditional banks possess the balance sheets, regulatory longevity, and trust, while fintechs possess the agility, product design depth, and distribution speed.

Moving forward, you will see banks increasingly acting as the foundational ledger layer, while infrastructure platforms like Maplerad abstract that complexity to deliver it to the market. It is an era of co-opetition and deep integration.

Nairametrics: As someone who mentors founders both in Africa and internationally, what common mistakes do you see fintech entrepreneurs making when trying to scale their businesses? 

Obinna Chukwujioke: The most common mistake founders make is trying to grow their business too fast before they have proven that people actually want what they are selling.

In fintech, it is easy to get tricked. If a company spends a ton of money on marketing discounts, lots of people will use the product. But that high activity is driven by the discounts, not by real demand.

Founders often try to expand into other countries before they have even figured out how to make a profit or handle the complicated laws in their own backyard.

My advice is always the same: perfect your business model first. Make sure your systems can actually make a profit, and then copy that success step by step in new places.

Nairametrics: Looking ahead, what is your long term vision for Maplerad, and what role do you hope the company will play in shaping the future of African commerce and financial infrastructure? 

Obinna Chukwujioke: Our long-term vision is to be the definitive operating system for commerce on the continent. I want Maplerad to be the infrastructure that people do not even have to think about because it just works flawlessly in the background.

Whether it is a global enterprise entering Africa for the first time or a local startup scaling globally, we want Maplerad to be the engine under the hood. Ultimately, we hope to look back and see that we played a foundational role in permanently closing the cross border trade gap and turning Africa into a genuinely unified economic powerhouse.