From Levent to Lagos: How Three Turkish Fintechs Quietly Built a Payments Empire Across Africa

Sometime in the first quarter of 2019, a small delegation from a Turkish electronic payments company called PayTR arrived in Lagos with two suitcases and a regulatory filing. They had no local office, no established banking relationships in Nigeria, and precisely one contact at the Central Bank of Nigeria, an introduction made, improbably, through a shared alumnus of Bogazici University's MBA programme. Within eighteen months, PayTR Africa held a Payment Service Provider licence from the CBN and was processing mobile wallet top-ups for three of Nigeria's mid-tier telecommunications operators. By the end of 2020, it had processed over 14 billion naira in transactions. Almost nobody in Istanbul had noticed.

PayTR Africa's quiet Nigerian expansion was not an isolated experiment. FinBridge, a cross-border payments platform originally built to serve Turkish exporters settling invoices in African currencies, obtained its Kenyan payments licence in mid-2020 and launched merchant acquiring services in Nairobi by January 2021. A third company, Ankara-headquartered OdemePay, had been operating in South Africa under a Financial Sector Conduct Authority registration since 2018, initially serving the Turkish expatriate remittance corridor before pivoting to domestic bill payments. Together, these three firms now hold active regulatory licences in seven African countries and collectively processed an estimated $420 million equivalent in transaction volume during the twelve months to June 2021.

The numbers are modest by the standards of Africa's fintech giants. Flutterwave, the Nigerian payments unicorn, processed $16 billion in 2020 alone. India's Paytm and China's Ant Group operate at scales that make the Turkish trio look like a rounding error. But the comparison misses the point. What is remarkable about the Turkish fintech push into Africa is not its size but its methodology. These are not venture-backed blitz-scaling operations. They are profitable, or near-profitable, companies that have expanded by forming joint ventures with local partners, hiring almost exclusively from local talent pools, and adapting their technology stacks to the specific regulatory and infrastructure realities of each market. PayTR Africa's Lagos team is 38 people, of whom two are Turkish nationals. FinBridge's Nairobi office runs on a Swahili-language interface built by Kenyan developers. OdemePay's South African operation is managed by a former Standard Bank executive who had never heard of the company until a headhunter called.

This approach stands in deliberate contrast to the playbooks that Chinese and Indian fintechs have deployed across the continent. Chinese payment companies, notably those in Ant Group's orbit, have tended to enter African markets through top-down agreements with national governments or large telecommunications conglomerates, bringing Chinese technology, Chinese capital, and frequently Chinese management. Indian fintechs, particularly in the remittance space, have leveraged the vast Indian diaspora across East Africa as a built-in customer base. The Turkish companies have neither advantage. Turkey's diaspora in sub-Saharan Africa is negligible. Ankara's diplomatic footprint, while growing, is nowhere near Beijing's. What the Turkish fintechs do have is a particular expertise in building payment systems that work in environments characterised by currency volatility, patchy digital infrastructure, and regulatory frameworks that change frequently and unpredictably, expertise earned, one might note, from decades of operating in Turkey itself.

The strategic implications are worth considering. Turkey's financial regulators have spent the better part of the last two years tightening the domestic payments market, revoking licences, increasing capital requirements, and generally making life harder for smaller fintech operators at home. Some of that tightening was overdue. But it has also created an incentive structure in which the most entrepreneurial Turkish fintech founders are looking outward for growth, and Africa, with its 1.3 billion people, its median age of 19, and its mobile money adoption rates that dwarf anything in Europe, is the most logical destination. If even a handful of these early bets pay off, Turkey may find that its most significant contribution to global financial services was not the Istanbul Financial Centre, with its gleaming towers and political patronage, but a handful of quietly competent payment companies that figured out how to make money move in Lagos, Nairobi, and Johannesburg. Stranger things have happened in fintech. And in Turkey.