Beyond M-Pesa: Africa’s Fintech Second Wave Targets Credit and Savings

The Payments Wave Succeeded — and Exposed the Next Gap

Africa built the most advanced mobile payment infrastructure on the planet. Sub-Saharan Africa generates 74% of global mobile money transaction volumes. M-Pesa in Kenya, MTN MoMo across West Africa, Wave in Senegal, OPay and PalmPay in Nigeria — these platforms collectively onboarded hundreds of millions of people to digital financial services within a decade.

But payments success revealed the next structural gap: access to credit. In advanced mobile money markets — countries where digital payment penetration is high and wallet activity is frequent — more than 50% of lending still occurs through informal or semiformal channels. A Nairobi market trader who receives and sends money via M-Pesa daily may still borrow from a savings cooperative or a neighborhood money lender at interest rates that formal banks cannot compete on because they cannot assess the trader’s creditworthiness.

The BCG report, released March 13, 2026, and titled “Beyond Payments: Unlocking Africa’s Second FinTech Wave,” identifies this gap as both the defining challenge and the largest commercial opportunity in African fintech. The market is expected to expand from current revenues to approximately $65 billion by 2030 — but only if the sector successfully transitions from transactional inclusion to scalable credit and savings infrastructure.

The five priorities BCG identifies are: interoperable digital infrastructure that allows wallet-to-bank-to-switch integration; data-driven credit with AI-enabled underwriting; regulatory coherence through proportional licensing frameworks; trust and resilience via expanded cybersecurity; and pan-African integration mechanisms that allow fintech products to scale across borders.

Why Credit Is the Hardest Problem in African Fintech

Credit is harder than payments for a structural reason: payments require trust in the system; credit requires trust in the individual borrower. The payment rail problem has been substantially solved by mobile money. The credit rail problem has not, because the data infrastructure needed for responsible lending at scale is still being built.

Traditional bank credit in Africa relies on collateral — land titles, vehicle ownership, salary slips from formal employers. Most African SMEs and micro-entrepreneurs hold none of these. They operate in informal or semi-formal sectors, their revenue is transaction-based rather than salaried, and their creditworthiness is embedded in relationships and social networks rather than formal documentation. A bank that applies its standard underwriting model to this population rejects 80 to 90% of applicants — not because they are bad credit risks, but because they are unscored risks.

The data-driven credit opportunity is the conversion of mobile money transaction history into a risk score. An SME that has processed $50,000 in monthly turnover through a mobile wallet for eighteen consecutive months has demonstrated revenue stability, payment discipline, and commercial activity. That transaction history is a credit signal — but only if the lending institution can access it, model it, and make a credit decision in a timeframe that matches the borrower’s actual cash flow need (often 24 to 72 hours).

Wave, PalmPay, and OPay have begun offering credit products to their merchant and wallet customer bases, using internal transaction data for underwriting. The structural constraint is that their credit data is siloed within their own platforms — it cannot be shared with other lenders or credit bureaus without the customer’s consent, and interoperability frameworks for credit data sharing remain underdeveloped across most African markets.

What Fintech Leaders, Investors, and Enterprise Compliance Teams Should Do

The second-wave opportunity is real and the BCG analysis gives it a credible size and timeline. But capturing it requires building the institutional prerequisites — the interoperability standards, the AI underwriting capability, the regulatory relationships — before competitors do. The five-priority framework from BCG translates into a concrete action agenda.

1. Build for interoperability first — credit products that require proprietary data silos will not scale

The credit platforms that will reach tens of millions of borrowers are those that can ingest transaction data from multiple mobile money providers, bank accounts, and utility payment histories — not just their own. M-Pesa’s credit product Fuliza works because Safaricom controls both the payment rail and the credit decision for its own customers. For any platform that does not control a dominant payment rail, the only path to scale is interoperability: building the APIs and consent frameworks that allow customers to share their transaction history with the credit platform of their choice. In Rwanda, the Licence Passporting MOU between Rwanda and Kenya is the regulatory model: it allows a fintech licensed in Rwanda to serve customers in Kenya without a separate local license, creating a cross-border interoperability framework. Credit platforms should identify comparable bilateral frameworks in their target markets and build into them.

2. Invest in AI underwriting models trained on African transaction data, not imported Western credit models

Credit models trained on US or European data are a poor fit for African SME credit risk. Default predictors that work in high-income markets (employment stability, credit card utilization, home ownership) have low predictive value for mobile money merchants whose income is lumpy, seasonal, and informal. The highest-performing African credit models use different variable sets: airtime top-up frequency, mobile money balance volatility, merchant payment acceptance patterns, M-Pesa chama (savings group) contribution consistency. Investors and operators who build or acquire proprietary African credit scoring models — trained on African behavioral data — will have a durable competitive advantage over those applying imported frameworks. BCG explicitly identifies AI-enabled underwriting as one of the five institutional priorities because this investment cannot be shortcut.

3. Engage regulators as partners before product launch, not after

Africa has 54 distinct regulatory environments. The fintech second wave’s success depends on regulatory coherence — and that coherence will not emerge without industry engagement. BCG’s third priority, proportional licensing frameworks, is not a regulatory gift to industry; it is a product of sustained engagement between fintechs, central banks, and financial intelligence units. Platforms that launch credit products in markets where mobile money lending is not yet clearly regulated — Angola, Ethiopia, Algeria — and then wait for regulatory clarification are taking a risk that can reverse months of growth in a single compliance order. The better model is to approach regulators with a self-imposed conduct framework: maximum interest rates, maximum loan-to-income ratios, consumer complaint processes. Regulators are more likely to create accommodative frameworks for operators who demonstrate they have already applied responsible lending standards.

4. Target the B2B payments gap, not just consumer credit

Consumer credit (M-Shwari, Fuliza, BNPL products) gets the most attention in African fintech reporting. BCG’s analysis identifies B2B payments as the larger and currently underserved opportunity. The formal-sector payment flows between African businesses — supplier payments, freight settlements, cross-border trade invoicing — are still predominantly handled through correspondent banking, with costs and timelines that create significant friction in supply chains. The B2B fintech opportunity is the digitization of these flows: supply chain finance, dynamic discounting, invoice factoring for SME suppliers to large buyers. The required regulatory framework is more complex than consumer credit (it involves commercial law, trade finance regulations, and cross-border settlement rules), but the contract sizes are larger and the customer acquisition cost per dollar of credit is lower.

5. Model Rwanda as a regulatory and infrastructure benchmark, not as an exception

Rwanda appears in multiple sections of the BCG analysis as a model for institutional coordination: forward-looking regulation, interoperable digital infrastructure, and the Licence Passporting MOU with Kenya. It is tempting to treat Rwanda as a special case — a small, well-governed country with concentrated political will for digital transformation. The more useful framing is that Rwanda has demonstrated what becomes possible when a central bank, a telecom regulator, and a financial intelligence unit share a coherent digitization agenda. Every fintech CFO and country manager should be studying the Rwanda model not as inspiration but as a stakeholder engagement template: which regulator, which ministry, and which development bank need to be in the same room for a proportional licensing framework to emerge.

The Correction Scenario

The $65 billion projection is a ceiling, not a floor. BCG’s analysis is explicit that reaching it requires all five institutional priorities to progress simultaneously. The failure mode is fragmentation: if credit data stays siloed, if AI underwriting is built on non-African data, if regulatory environments stay fragmented across 54 jurisdictions, and if B2B digitization lags consumer products, the second wave produces a smaller market than the first wave’s infrastructure would support.

There is also a concentration risk. M-Pesa’s success is a global fintech benchmark, but it has made Kenyan mobile money dependent on a single operator’s infrastructure decisions. Fuliza and M-Shwari are dominant in Kenyan consumer credit because Safaricom controls both the distribution channel and the credit product. Second-wave credit markets dominated by one or two operators per country reproduce this concentration dynamic — lower consumer protection, higher interest rates, and no competitive pressure on underwriting quality. The interoperability priority in BCG’s framework is in part a structural remedy for concentration risk, not just a technical convenience. Investors and regulators who treat interoperability as optional rather than foundational will be constructing a second wave that looks like the first wave’s concentration problem at larger scale.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources & Further Reading

• Beyond Payments: Unlocking Africa’s Second FinTech Wave — Boston Consulting Group (BCG)
• Africa’s Fintech Growth Set to Move Beyond Payments — TechAfrica News
• Africa’s Fintech Growth Enters a New Phase as Kigali Emerges as Hub — Pan African Visions
• Africa Fintech Revenues to Hit $65 Billion by 2030 — Nigeria Communications Week
• Africa Fintech Growth Beyond Payments — Whirlspot Media
• Visa Africa Fintech Accelerator Milestone: 104 Startups — TechAfrica News