Paystack’s Akinlade puts business infrastructure at centre of next growth phase.
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.
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