Paystack will look beyond payment acceptance to address more of businesses’ financial needs as it enters its second decade, co-founder and chief executive Shola Akinlade said at Moonshot 2026 in Lagos.
Akinlade described how the Nigerian fintech’s payments infrastructure had supported businesses across other sectors, arguing that its next phase would build on the same premise: enabling entrepreneurs to concentrate on their products.
The discussion traced Paystack’s development from a company helping Nigerian merchants collect payments online to a broader financial services group with operations across several African markets.
“I feel very qualified to talk about ambition because a lot of my ambitions over the last 10 years have been realised,” he said. “If you know anything about the Paystack story, we had a simple ambition to build to help merchants accept payments in Nigeria and then probably Africa.”
Akinlade used PiggyVest, the Nigerian savings platform, to illustrate how the infrastructure Paystack developed had enabled businesses beyond its original ambitions.
He recalled how the founders approached Paystack with an idea to automatically debit users’ accounts so they could save money regularly. Paystack already had the infrastructure to support the idea, even though building a savings business was not its own ambition.
“The most exciting thing about that story is that I didn’t do anything. The founders built the business; they took the risk,” he said. “The only thing we had to do was focus on building our infrastructure.”
The experience, he added, showed why infrastructure businesses could have an influence beyond the services they directly offered.
“That’s what really gets exciting about building infrastructure because you don’t know what people are going to build on it.”
Akinlade said that influence also extended to former employees who had gone on to establish companies of their own. He cited Douglas Kendyson, founder of Selar, which helps creators sell digital products; Femi Aluko and Olumide Ojo, co-founders of food delivery company Chowdeck; and Abdulhamid Hassan, co-founder of financial infrastructure provider Mono.
“One of the things I have learned in the last 10 years is that ambition is contagious,” he said. “When you achieve the ambition, every other person you engage with, the ambition continues to go round.”
Amandine Lobelle, the company’s chief operating office, outlined the company’s geographical expansion, saying Paystack had grown its footprint across Ghana, Kenya, Côte d’Ivoire and South Africa, while securing regulatory licences for Egypt and Rwanda.
The discussion comes as Paystack broadens its corporate structure and product offering. In January, it announced The Stack Group, a parent company encompassing Paystack, consumer payments app Zap, Paystack Microfinance Bank and venture studio TSG Labs.
Akinlade said the company was expanding its view of the problems it could solve as customers’ needs developed beyond collecting payments.