Growing Chinese influence in African fintech

By Rafia Raji

At US$1.4trn, Sub-Saharan Africa made up 66% of global mobile money transactions of US$2.1trn in 2025, with the savings and loans component beginning to show notable growth.^[1],[2] Nigeria (45%), Kenya (13%) and South Africa (10%) make up more than two-thirds of Africa’s cross-border payment fintechs.^[3] Light-touch financial regulation has enabled African fintechs to grow rapidly, but that is beginning to change, as regulatory oversight and market scrutiny are simultaneously adapting to the evolution of African fintechs into broader financial services beyond payments.^{[4],[5],[6],[7]} African fintech revenues are projected to grow 13 times to about US$65bn by 2030, making the continent the highest growing fintech market globally.^[8] In 2026, Africa already accounted for more than 70% of global mobile money transactions, according to the Boston Consulting Group, with lending trailing payments as a major fintech product on the continent. Relative to global peers, African fintechs remain concentrated in payments, leaving open largely untapped opportunities in alternative financing, digital assets, wealth technology, neobanking, insurtech, regtech and enterprise fintech.^[9] The evolution of fintech in China from mobile payments to microlending, insurance, credit rating and wealth management offers a glimpse of the possibilities of African fintech, which though still largely a payments business, is slowly expanding into wider financial services, especially credit and wealth management.^[10]

Chinese-backed Opay and PalmPay are beginning to rival traditional Nigerian banks through agency and mobile banking

In the first half of 2026, OPay, a Chinese fintech company that almost entirely does its digital banking business in Nigeria, began preparations for a prospective initial public offering (IPO) of its shares on a US stock exchange, highlighting Africa’s high-growing fintech sector and its positive future prospects.^[11] PalmPay, another Chinese fintech company primarily focused on Nigeria’s financial sector as well, has also announced plans to list its shares on a stock exchange in Hong Kong.^[12] In 2019-21, OPay raised US$570m in financing, while PalmPay raised US$140m, both from mostly Chinese investors.^[13],[14] When OPay started its operations in Nigeria in 2018 originally as a super-app, it was not expected to last, as its ride-hailing and delivery service businesses failed relatively quickly, before it finally found success in payments, which it has begun to expand into savings and loans.^[15] PalmPay joined the fray soon after in 2019, cementing a rising trend of Chinese investment in the African fintech sector ever since.^[16],[17] A cash-crunch crisis in Nigeria ahead of its 2023 general elections played into the strategic strengths of OPay and PalmPay in agency and mobile banking, as bank branches were closed to customers for lack of adequate cash, enabling Nigerian fintech firms to fill the gap.^{[18],[19],[20]}

Agency banking and mobile banking are how African fintechs are effectively challenging commercial banks, whose supposed strategic advantages with automated teller machines (ATMs) and country-wide branch networks are increasingly underwhelming. According to a 2025 West Africa banking industry survey by KPMG, a global consultancy, half of Nigerian financial services customers used agency banking (via handheld point-of-sale machines) and mobile banking (via mobile phones) channels at least once a day, compared to 2% for bank branches and 6% for automated teller machines (ATMs), which explains the success of Chinese-backed OPay and PalmPay, as well as Nigerian-founded Moniepoint, the leading fintechs behind the agency and mobile banking surge in Nigeria since 2023.^[21] Since the portable point-of-sale (POS) machines used by payment agents were produced by Chinese original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), Chinese fintechs Opay and PalmPay had a home-technology edge in the distribution of their services. Also, Transsion-sponsored PalmPay pre-installed the PalmPay app on its mobile phone brands which were already being used by more than 80% of African mobile phone owners.^[22]

OPay, which is prospectively valued at US$4bn on total assets of US$1.5bn, made revenue of US$536.3m in 2025, more than doubling its previous year’s revenue of US$205.7m, with loan originations almost quadrupling to US$938.3m in 2025 from US$243.9m in 2024.^[23] More than four-fifths of OPay’s revenue originate from Nigeria, with the latest year’s Nigerian component amounting to US$472.4m. 2023 revenue for PalmPay, which is valued at US$800m to US$900m, was US$63.9m, which reports suggest has more than doubled in the following years.^[24],[25] Together, OPay and PalmPay 2025 revenues of at least US$600m compare with about a tenth of Nigerian banking industry revenue of US$8.7bn, a remarkable feat for fintech upstarts, which though have yet to fully scale their lending businesses, are effectively becoming competitive digital banks.^[26]

Partnerships with Chinese ICT infrastructure providers and super-app platforms are powering African fintech growth

Chinese information and technology infrastructure provider Huawei facilitated the relocation of M-Pesa’s servers to Kenya from Germany in 2015, enabling it to broaden its financial services offering, as well as an infrastructure upgrade in 2025.^{[27],[28],[29]} Partnerships with Chinese fintechs AliPay and WeChat Pay have also enabled M-Pesa to strengthen its global reach.^[30] Booming Ethiopian mobile money platform TeleBirr launched in 2021 is also supported with Huawei-built infrastructure.^[31],[32] In 2019, Nigeria’s Flutterwave and China’s Alipay integrated their platforms for seamless China-Africa cross-border payments, which has been enabling it to expand its Asian footprint since.^[33],[34]  Leveraging on a strategic partnership with Singapore-headquartered Ant International, a subsidiary of China’s Ant Group, which owns and operates Chinese super app AliPay, South African mobile telecommunication firm MTN announced in mid-2026 that it plans to expand its mobile money business beyond just payments to lending across several African countries, starting with Nigeria in the third quarter of 2026.^{[35],[36],[37],[38],[39]} The announcement came after MTN, which is Africa’s largest telecommunication firm, also signed a strategic memorandum of understanding with China’s Huawei, its longstanding technology infrastructure partner, in March 2026.^[40]

South Africa’s Standard Bank, which is Africa’s largest bank, was authorised by the People’s Bank of China (PBC, China’s central bank) in 2025 to integrate with China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS) and jointly set up the Renminbi Clearing Bank of Africa with the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), China’s largest bank, for direct China-Africa yuan settlements in local African currencies.^{[41],[42],[43],[44]} Incidentally, Standard Bank has expressed interest in a stake in OPay ahead of its US IPO, which highlights the Chinese-backed but Nigeria-focused fintech’s growing significance. In July 2026, Angola’s Banco de Fomento Angola (BFA), the country’s second largest bank, announced it will be joining CIPS as well, in reaction to increasing demand for direct yuan settlements by their clients, adding to a trend being seen across the continent, with other African banks expectedly gearing up to be able to provide the service.^{[45],[46],[47]} China’s digital technology and telecommunication original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) will also be critical to building and strengthening the digital and cloud infrastructure that would be needed by Nigerian banks and fintech companies to meet the regulatory requirement to localise all payments data by January 1st, 2027.^{[48],[49],[50]}

 

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