Nigeria is widely regarded as Africa’s largest fintech market based on the number of fintech companies, the valuation of these companies, and the volume of transactions. A McKinsey report published by the World Bank estimates that Nigeria’s fintech sector makes up around 30 percent of Africa’s fintech market. Forty-seven percent of Africa’s fintech transactions were consummated in Nigeria last year, while the country’s fintech sector experienced a 70 percent year-on-year growth between 2023 and 2024.
The continuous evolution of Nigeria’s fintech industry has necessitated the need for specialized technology companies to serve as the backbone and offer critical services in a sector that is increasingly driven by high mobile penetration, a tech-savvy youthful population, and the push to increase financial inclusion. These specialized technology firms are fintech infrastructure companies.
Fintech infrastructure organizations provide the technology backbone, framework, and system architecture that enable financial services such as payments and lending to operate securely and efficiently. One such fintech infrastructure organization that provides the pillar for fintech companies to operate and deliver financial services in an efficient and secure manner is Mida Technologies.
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Founded in 2023 by Mayowa Anibaba, Adija Uzodinma, and Oke Egbi, Mida Technologies has evolved into a digital finance backbone provider whose operations are critical to the smooth running of the finance industry.
Speaking on Mida’s sector-wide support role as a fintech infrastructure start-up, Mayowa Anibaba, who is the chief executive officer, said, “Companies like Mida provide the technological backbone that enables efficient, scalable, and inclusive financial services. We serve as the bedrock of the fintech ecosystem.”
According to him, the solutions that the company offers enable lenders to focus on key areas such as strategic business growth, meeting regulatory requirements, and provision of innovative financial products and services while outsourcing certain back-end operations to firms like Mida.
“We can easily integrate critical back-end operations of financial institutions. They only need to establish system protocols and enable us to plug and play. We can also iterate as we go on, enabling flexibility in response to exigencies,” he noted.
Oke Egbi, Mida’s chief revenue officer, described the company’s systems architecture as capable of providing risk and behavioral analysis through AI-powered insights and segmentation, as well as ethical tracking and management of debtors via centralized data hubs and real-time data access.
Citing an example of how Mida, as a fintech infrastructure startup, can help achieve financial inclusion growth in the credit sector, she said, “Many loan requests are denied because of past defaults by the borrower. However, most of these defaults arise from gaps in collections and recovery processes and technologies. Mida can help financial organizations to overcome the various debt portfolio management challenges through its innovative technology products thereby contributing its quota to bridging the financial exclusion gap.”
Adija Uzodinma, chief operating officer, highlights the benefits of fintech infrastructure providers such as Mida to Nigeria’s fintech ecosystem. “Fintech infrastructure providers help to breed innovation because it allows companies to focus on developing new products and services rather than building technologies. They also help organizations to quickly scale their operations. Fintech infrastructure providers also reduce the operational costs of organizations because they are able to free resources that would have been expended on building tech infrastructure from scratch,” she said.
As Nigeria’s fintech ecosystem continues to experience exponential growth, fintech infrastructure providers will play key roles that will solve pressing challenges peculiar to financial institutions. Some of these challenges relate to low recovery rates, debtor experience, cost efficiency, and regulatory compliance.
For a fintech infrastructure provider like Mida Technologies, its strategy of loan recoveries through empathy and technology would translate to improved recovery rates for credit companies. Positive debtor experience during the loan recovery process will help fuel the recovery rates. Improved recovery rates result in increased revenues, better-run fintechs, growth in the fintech industry, and absorption of more people into the finance ecosystem.
