Africa’s fintech sector has proven its ability to innovate. The next challenge is to ensure legacy systems and siloed data don’t slow things down.
African fintech has firmly established itself as a global leader, backed
by both capital flows and market fundamentals. In 2025, tech startups
across the continent attracted around $4.1 billion in combined equity
and debt, with the fintech segment still the largest equity segment[1].
In short, there is a significant opportunity in a market that’s far
from saturated. There are, says McKinsey, a plethora of untapped
opportunities that include cross-border payments, SME lending and
embedded, sector-specific solutions[2]. However, says Mandla Mbonambi,
CEO of Africonology, fintech innovation is outpacing the sector’s
ability to plug it into old systems.
“As a result, the real constraint to change has become integration,”
he continues. “Legacy systems were not designed for real-time,
API-driven products and data is scattered across channels and
back-office systems, limiting personalisation and cross-sell
opportunities, as well as governance, security and efficiencies.”
While on the one hand, the market has depth, velocity, and real-world
relevance, on the other, it is entering a complex phase of growth in
which its essential fintech integration is being implemented correctly.
And this is where the real bottleneck now sits.
As instant payments, digital wallets, embedded finance and
platform-based services accelerate, many companies are still trying to
push modern experiences through ageing core banking systems, fragmented
data estates and integration layers held together by workarounds. Banks,
mobile money operators, remittance companies and fintechs are
increasingly offering new ways of banking and accessing funds,
particularly around cross-border payments. Still, these solutions are
also fragmented with high costs and delays.
“This is not a pressure unique to Africa,” says Mbonambi. “But it
is particularly important here because the continent has moved so
rapidly in financial innovation. If Africa wants to continue leading in
this sector, integration has to become a strategic priority. Legacy
system integration is a persistent obstacle, with challenges that
include poorly managed data migration, incompatible system
architectures, and insufficient testing protocols.”
Companies need a strategic framework that aligns technology investments
with business objectives while still ensuring smooth integration across
the enterprise. Innovation at the front end has become relatively easy
to showcase. A new lending feature, a smarter onboarding journey, a
slicker payments interface, and an AI-driven customer layer are visible
wins. The harder work happens underneath, where systems need to talk to
one another cleanly and reliably.
MuleSoft’s 2025 Connectivity Benchmark shows how widespread this issue
has become: the average enterprise now runs 897 applications, yet only
29% are integrated, and 90% say data silos are creating business
obstacles. With IT teams spending close to 40% of their time designing,
building, and testing custom integrations, it’s clear that integration
debt has become one of the biggest brakes on digital and AI
initiatives[3].
“You need processes that make sense, clean data and people who
understand both the business and the technology. If you skip these
steps, you’re just building an expensive way to make mistakes,” says
Mbonambi. “Solving for these incoming bottlenecks translates into four
immediate priorities: legacy modernisation, API enablement, integration
as a service and platform expertise.”
Core systems do not always need to be ripped out. Still, they do need to
be re-architected so old and new can coexist with less friction because
careful integrations can allow old and new systems to coexist while
protecting prior investments. API-led connectivity gives institutions a
more flexible way to expose services, connect partners, orchestrate data
flows and reduce the dependence on brittle point-to-point integrations.
“Composable enterprise architectures built on API-led connectivity can
reduce integration costs by 30% while creating reusable building blocks
for innovation,” says Mbonambi.
The third step is integration as a service to ensure organisations have
integration capability embedded into delivery from the start, which is
supported by governance, testing and visibility. Then, platform
expertise wraps all the factors into a cohesive whole, providing a deep
understanding of the business ecosystems and how to bring them together
coherently.
“Africa has already shown that it can lead in mobile money, digital
payments and financial access,” concludes Mbonambi. “The next step
is less glamorous, it’s process, process, process because the winners
in fintech’s next chapter will be the ones that can connect core
banking, customer channels, partner ecosystems and data in ways that are
secure, scalable and commercially sustainable.”
