Nigerian fintech heavyweight Paystack has taken its boldest step yet beyond payments, acquiring Ladder Microfinance Bank.
The fintech giant has quickly rebranded its new acquisition as Paystack Microfinance Bank (MFB) in a strategic shift that could reshape how African businesses access credit, deposits, and embedded financial services.
After nearly a decade building the backbone of online payments in Nigeria, the deal gives Paystack regulatory cover to hold deposits, lend directly to businesses and offer banking-as-a-service products.
More importantly, Paystack's chief operating officer, Amandine Lobelle, highlighted that it allows the company to exert greater control over the trillions of naira that already flow through its platform every month, turning transaction data into a powerful engine for credit and treasury products.
“After 10 years of building payment infrastructure and going deep, we realised that businesses needed more than just getting paid to grow. We wanted to leverage the expertise that we have built over the last decade to continue to address some of the pain points that businesses have,” said Lobelle.
Paystack MFB will operate as a sister company to its payments business, initially focusing on working capital loans, merchant cash advances, overdrafts and term loans for small and medium-sized enterprises.
By using real-time payment data to underwrite loans, Paystack believes it can offer faster approvals and more accurate risk pricing than traditional lenders, directly tackling Nigeria’s estimated $32 billion small business financing gap.
For Paystack, founded in 2016 and acquired by Stripe in 2020, the move marks a strategic evolution from being just a payments processor to becoming a core part of the financial operating system for African businesses.
Today, Paystack supports more than 300,000 businesses across Nigeria, Ghana, and South Africa and has become one of Africa’s most trusted fintech infrastructure providers.
The banking licence is a game-changer as payments, once Paystack’s main growth engine, are increasingly commoditised across Africa. Lending, deposits and treasury services offer deeper margins, stickier relationships and long-term sustainability.
By layering banking services on top of payments, Paystack is betting that infrastructure depth will outperform flashy consumer scale.
However, the move also throws the Nigerian-born fintech giant into fierce competition with digital -first lenders and neobanks such as Moniepoint, Kuda, OPay and PalmPay, which already operate at massive scale. Still, Paystack’s strength lies in its merchant-first focus and developer-friendly APIs.
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