The first wave of African fintech had a legible story: mobile money reached people who had never had a bank account. M-Pesa gave Kenyans a way to send money from a feature phone. MTN MoMo spread across West Africa. Airtel Money built out corridors in East Africa. The story was about access — getting people onto a financial rail so they could participate in the economy through it.
That story is not finished. But a new chapter has started, and it is about a different problem entirely.
Boston Consulting Group published a major report on Africa's second fintech wave in May 2026, estimating that Africa's fintech revenues could grow from roughly $10 billion today to more than $65 billion by 2030. The growth projection is not the interesting part. The mechanism is.
Payments currently account for between seventy and eighty percent of fintech revenues across Africa. BCG projects that by 2030, digital lending, embedded finance, and business-to-business financial services could contribute up to half of total industry revenues. The shift from payments to credit is the shift from access to depth — from being on the rail to using the rail to build something durable.
The phrase BCG uses is "data becoming the new collateral." What this means in practice: a small trader in Accra who has been sending and receiving mobile money for three years has a transaction history that describes her revenue rhythm, her supplier relationships, her seasonal patterns. That history is more predictive than a credit score built on salary slips she does not have, and it is already sitting in the mobile money provider's database. The second wave of African fintech is about turning that data into a loan she can actually receive, at a rate and tenure that reflect her actual risk profile rather than her absence from the formal credit system.
This is not hypothetical. Digital lenders in Kenya, Nigeria, and Uganda have been operating on versions of this model for several years. What the second wave represents is the formalization of that model into regulated products with longer tenure, lower rates, and real consumer protections — and the extension of the model into markets where digital lending is still nascent.
The 3i Africa Summit, held in Accra from May 6 to 8, convened central bank governors, regulators, investors, and fintech founders under the theme "The Next Frontier: Shaping Africa's Integrated FinTech Future." The conversation that dominated the conference was about interoperability — the shared infrastructure question. Mobile money in Ghana does not natively talk to mobile money in Senegal. A credit profile built on MTN MoMo data does not transfer to an Airtel Money account. The second wave cannot scale across corridors without some version of shared infrastructure becoming common, which is why the summit's interoperability sessions drew the most sustained attention from regulators who understand what they have to build before the applications can arrive.
Airtel Africa, which operates Airtel Money across fourteen countries, pushed back the IPO of its mobile money arm to the second half of 2026, citing worsening global market conditions. The company had been expected to raise between $1.5 billion and $2 billion. The delay is a signal about institutional appetite at a specific market moment, not about the underlying value — which is why the IPO remains scheduled rather than cancelled.
The structural conditions that make this a meaningful story in Africa apply, with local variation, across most emerging markets. Mongolia has smartphone penetration above seventy percent, a banking sector dominated by a small number of commercial banks, and a small-business credit gap that is persistently underserved. Central Asia and Southeast Asia share similar profiles: high mobile penetration, thin formal credit infrastructure, banking sectors that have limited appetite for small-ticket lending because the economics of individual assessment do not pencil out at that scale. The mobile money transaction data asset exists in all of these markets, even where the formal lending products built on it do not yet.
For builders, the question is where your product sits relative to this transition. The payment layer in most emerging markets is being commoditized — margins compress as more providers access the same mobile money rails. The credit layer and the embedded finance layer are where the next decade of value is being built, and where the software problems — credit scoring from non-traditional data, risk modeling at small loan sizes, invoice financing for SMEs — are still genuinely hard and genuinely unsolved.
The traders who spent the last decade on the rail are ready for what the rail can now do for them.
The short of it.
A May 2026 BCG analysis estimates Africa's fintech revenues could grow sixfold by 2030, with the growth coming not from payments — which currently account for 70-80% of revenues — but from digital lending, embedded finance, and B2B financial services built on mobile money transaction data as collateral. The shift from access to depth is structural, not cyclical, and it is not Africa-specific: any market where mobile penetration is high and formal banking infrastructure is thin has the same underlying data asset waiting to be used. Builders in those markets should be thinking about where their product sits in the transition from enabling transactions to enabling credit.