Nigeria’s FinTech space is growing from strength to strength and the West African nation is well on its way to becoming a hub on the continent, if developments over the past few years are anything to go by.
Nigeria experienced a massive rise in mobile money operations that gained the world's attention in 2016. According to Finextra, operations grew from an average monthly transaction value of $5 million to $142,8 million last year.
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A KPMG report released in December revealed that investment in Nigerian FinTech firms over the past two years had exceeded more than $200 million and there has been a dramatic increase in the number of investments, startups and incubators, which is evident in the fact that while there were just two deals completed in the whole of 2010, 14 were put to bed in September 2016 alone.
Much of this FinTech activity can be put down to Nigeria's population boom, with the country expected to surpass the USA by 2050. Nigeria's growing workforce is both skilled and entrepreneurial and there are also more than 23 million smartphones in use and over 150 million active subscriber lines, which are further fuelling the development of FinTech.
