F-Squared Podcast

A leader’s previous success leaves a difficult question unanswered: can they deliver in the conditions your business actually faces? David Plummer, co-founder of Triage and author of The Investable Leader, draws on executive search and 17 years leading corporate turnarounds to explain how context, character and identity shape leadership under pressure. From the different demands of African markets to the loss of a founder’s identity after an exit, the conversation explores what boards, investors and founders can learn about the people they appoint and about themselves.

When a supplier is waiting and a payment is stuck, a business owner needs a clear answer and someone who can help. Luc Varejes, COO at Lumepay, explains how human support, compliance guidance and dependable payment infrastructure fit together in serving African businesses. We discuss why clients still want to speak to a person, what formal providers can learn from trusted informal networks, and how liquidity and backup partners shape the service a customer actually receives.

Absa's Pan-African ambition raises a question about where the bank's next ideas, products and leaders will come from. After nineteen years at NCBA, Eric Muriuki, Absa's Managing Executive for Pan-African Growth Strategy, Platforms and Digital Ventures, joins Samora Kariuki to discuss his personal transition and a platform strategy that connects banking with other businesses. From a shopping mall's shared infrastructure to the cultural reach of Afrobeats, he explains how learning across African markets, understanding a young population and attracting creative talent could help African teams build for global audiences.

M-Pesa built mobile money's distribution advantage, but Vodacom's next growth phase depends on far more than cash-in and cash-out. Epimack Mbeteni, Chief Commercial Officer of Vodacom Fintech Group, explains how shared platforms, local execution and sector-specific products support a 103 million-customer business—and why Vodacom wants core and non-core fintech revenue to reach a 50/50 split by 2030. The conversation covers M-Pesa's two failed launches in South Africa, the super-app reset, the Safaricom shareholding change and whether innovation can defend the lead that distribution created.

Kenya has broad financial access and a rapidly expanding digital-credit market, yet only a small minority of adults are financially healthy. Kevin Mutiso, Chairman of the Digital Financial Services Association of Kenya, explains how 2022 regulation unlocked capital, larger loan sizes and specialist lending for traders and boda-boda operators. Samora and Kevin examine the long tail beyond Fuliza and M-Shwari, the data-sharing challenge behind over-indebtedness, and whether digital lenders can help borrowers graduate from short-term liquidity to growth capital.

In 2009, Tayo Oviosu printed a 300-page regulatory application, packed it into a suitcase, and carried it to Abuja because Nigeria had no framework for mobile payments and someone had to ask the Central Bank to write one. Seventeen years later, the lesson he draws is the one most fintech founders still resist: you cannot bank a billion people by building a bank. You bank them by building the infrastructure other people build on.

Tayo is the founder and CEO of Paga, one of Nigeria's earliest and most enduring fintech companies, founded when M-Pesa was barely two years old. This conversation is a masterclass in strategic discipline; what Paga chose not to build, and why that restraint is the reason it is still standing.

We get into the real economics of agent banking (why roughly 80% of Nigerian agent transactions are cash withdrawals, and what that does to financial-inclusion timelines), why Paga stayed out of the card-gateway war when Paystack and Flutterwave emerged, the AWS/Netflix analogy behind Paga Engine, the Doroki thesis that African retailers need an operating system before they can be banked, and Paga's move into US rails. Through naira devaluations, funding droughts, and the rise of OPay and PalmPay, Paga stayed solvent and stayed focused.

Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

10:00 - The suitcase of binders: cold-calling the CBN in 2009

24:00 - Why Paga stayed out of the card-gateway market

33:00 - The 20-year business: real economics of agent banking

40:00 -  "You cannot bank a billion people by building a bank" — the Paga Engine thesis

44:00 - The Doroki thesis: an operating system for African retailers

47:00 - US rails and hosted dollar accounts (Swift, ACH, Fedwire)

51:00 - Three hours to twelve seconds: reconciliation with Claude Code

Pinned quote "Revenue is vanity; gross profit pays the bills. We taught our team that everyone acts like an owner and negotiates the best deal for everything, from marketing to supplies." - Tayo Oviosu

Connect with Tayo & Paga Tayo Oviosu (LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/in/oviosu/ Paga:https://www.mypaga.com/ Doroki: https://doroki.com/

African traders earn in Europe and pay in China. Stablecoins are finally solving that triangular liquidity gap — and reshaping how Africa-Asia trade finance works.

April Long spent thirteen years inside corridor banking — Standard Chartered, Gulf African Bank, and the Africa-Asia fintech ecosystem. She watched the cost of stablecoin liquidity fall from unworkable to roughly 50 basis points round-trip. This episode is her structural explanation of why that shift matters more than most people in African trade finance currently understand.

“Money needs to flow in a triangular structure — receiving from Europe, paying to China. Africa lacks a financial hub where money can flow in and out freely. Consequently, money is forced to find fragmented, inefficient ways to flow.” — April Long

What You Will Hear:

0:00 - Introduction

07:54 - The Corridor Banking Model.

14:01 - How Off-Ramp Costs Change the Game for Stablecoins

21:00 - The Triangular Liquidity Problem - Who is Africa Selling to and Where Are we Buying From?

28:00 - Compliance as Structural Barrier

33:20 - How Stablecoins Act Like a Financial Hub

37:30 - Why Nigeria Changed First

41:00 - The Velocity Argument — Turning Money Over Fast and How it Grows the Economy

53:09 - The China Shift — Why China-Africa trade grew 18% in 2025

Read by 16,000+ operators, investors, and practitioners across 126 countries.

Subscribe: https://frontierfintech.substack.com

Samora Kariuki (Host): https://www.linkedin.com/in/samorakariuki/

April Long (Guest): https://www.linkedin.com/in/longapril/

Frontier Fintech: https://frontierfintech.substack.com

If this episode was useful, a like or subscription takes four seconds and helps independent media reach more of the right people. The algorithm runs on signals — yours included.

Africa's mobile money networks have over 800 million registered accounts spread across dozens of closed loops. Moving money between them; across borders, currencies, and regulatory jurisdictions, remains the unfinished infrastructure project of a generation. Onafriq was built on the thesis that someone had to connect the dots.

Samora Kariuki sits down with Dare Okoudjou, founder and CEO of Onafriq (formerly MFS Africa), the Pan-African payment network that connects mobile money wallets, bank accounts, cards, and now stablecoin rails across 40+ countries. Dare's path is unusual: an engineer who trained at PricewaterhouseCoopers in Paris, helped architect MTN Mobile Money across Africa from 2006 to 2009, and then left to build the interoperability layer he could see the market would eventually require. Sixteen years later, the vision has proven out, though the path there looked almost nothing like the original plan.

This conversation is a rare inside account of what it actually takes to build foundational financial infrastructure in Africa. Dare breaks down the layered architecture of cross-border payments (messaging, risk, currency, settlement), the strategic acquisitions of Beyonic and GTP that accelerated Onafriq's enterprise relationships, and why the platform is now placing simultaneous bets on mobile money interoperability, cards, PAPSS, and stablecoins. He also challenges the entire African fintech industry to ask whether mobile money, as currently architected, is still the right model.

In This Episode, You Will Hear:

• The MTN Origin: How Dare helped build the foundations of MTN MoMo across Africa and why that experience made the MFS Africa opportunity obvious in retrospect.

• The Fax Machine Problem: Why being early to a network business means spending years being nearly useless, and why the goal is simply not to die until the vision comes true.

• The Remittance Framing Problem: Why calling intra-African cross-border payments "remittances" actively harms how banks, investors, and regulators engage with the industry.

• The Acquisition Logic: Why Onafriq bought Beyonic and GTP, and what enterprise relationships with banks actually require that organic sales cannot deliver.

• Payments Always Revert to Standard: Why Dare believes mobile money must achieve GSM-style interoperability or risk being absorbed into the card standard.

• The Stablecoin Thesis: Why stablecoins are best understood as programmable mobile money for the internet, and why the dollar stablecoin narrative may create systemic risks for African banking systems.

• If M-Pesa Were Built Today: The sharpest strategic question in African fintech, posed by someone who was in the room when the original was designed.

Key Quote: "The goal was simply not to die until it came true."

Connect with Us:

• Samora Kariuki (Host): https://www.linkedin.com/in/samorakariuki/

• Dare Okoudjou (Guest): https://www.linkedin.com/in/dare-okoudjou/

Frontier Fintech: https://frontierfintech.substack.com

Valr is Africa's largest crypto exchange by volume, but the business has evolved well beyond exchange. Under founder Farzam Ehsani, Valr now provides modular on-chain financial infrastructure that banks and telcos plug into to offer their own customers crypto exposure, stablecoin savings, tokenised assets, and cross-border settlement. In a sector where reputational risk is the norm, the word that keeps coming up around Valr is "respect."

Farzam's path to building it has been circuitous. His family are Bahá'ís of Persian origin who were persecuted in Iran and settled in Nairobi in 1975. He grew up in Westlands, moved through Deloitte in San Francisco and McKinsey in Johannesburg, and joined Rand Merchant Bank during the Greek debt crisis, where he dismissed Bitcoin as a scam before falling into the rabbit hole that led him to set up the bank's blockchain unit and ultimately leave to build Valr in 2018.

In this conversation with Samora Kariuki, Farzam covers how Valr was built, why an exchange was the logical starting point, and how the business expanded into institutional infrastructure. He also reveals an unexpected source of conviction: a 1999 Bahá'í document that predicted the replacement of fragmented monetary systems by a single electronic currency, a decade before Bitcoin existed.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• How Farzam's journey from Westlands to Deloitte, McKinsey, and Rand Merchant Bank led to founding Valr.

• Why an exchange — a marketplace where people express divergent views by buying or selling — was the most logical starting point, and how Valr expanded from there.

• How Valr's B2B2C model provides modular on-chain financial infrastructure (custody, liquidity, matching engines, risk engines) to institutions across Africa.

• The concept of double-spending: the foundational problem Bitcoin solves that most crypto commentators never discuss.

• Why the Bitcoin price is fundamentally a story about fiat devaluation, not market speculation.

• How a 1999 Bahá'í prophecy about a universal electronic currency — written a decade before Bitcoin — underpins Farzam's worldview on where money is heading.

• Why stablecoins pegged to the US dollar inherit the dollar's long-term fragility — and what the "free banking era" tells us about what comes next.

• How fractional reserve banking works identically with Bitcoin, and why crypto doesn't eliminate the risk of bank runs.

• Why regulatory maturity — not market size — is the key variable in Valr's expansion across Kenya, Nigeria, and beyond.

Key Quote: "I can host my files, music, and documents locally on my phone or computer, but I do not have that option for money. I have to rely on someone else's servers to show me my balance on their database."

Connect with Us:

• Samora Kariuki (Host): https://www.linkedin.com/in/samorakariuki/

• Farzam Ehsani (Guest): https://www.linkedin.com/in/farzam-ehsani/

• Frontier Fintech: www.frontierfintech.substack.com

• Useful Video on Farzam’s Thinking - https://youtu.be/5lup0b-FWBM?si=juJWtprP2iG8kfni

Banks have spent decades building the infrastructure that makes money move. Now, a new set of rails; blockchain, stablecoins, tokenized assets,  is being laid alongside those systems. The question isn't whether banks will have to engage with digital assets. It's whether they'll do it in time, and whether they'll do it right.

Rob Downes, Nkahiseng Ralepeli, and Robyn Lawson lead the digital assets team inside ABSA's Corporate and Investment Bank. Their journey started not with a bold strategic declaration, but with a quiet invitation, Project Khokha, the South African Reserve Bank's blockchain research initiative in 2021. Two weeks after FTX collapsed, they walked into Group Exco to make the case for why ABSA needed to move. This episode is the inside account of what happened next: three years of internal education, regulatory navigation, technical integration, and careful product sequencing that has produced what the team believes is one of the first regulated digital asset custody offerings on the continent and a gold-backed stablecoin built with regulator visibility by design.

Samora Kariuki sits down with the ABSA digital assets team to work through what it actually takes for a Tier-1 African bank to build in this space. The conversation covers the internal politics of getting risk and compliance on board, why custody was the right first product, the surprising bottleneck in tech integration, the demand signal they're seeing from institutional clients around tokenized assets and stablecoins, and how they've designed their gold-backed stablecoin to bring regulators along rather than force a confrontation.

In This Episode, You Will Hear:

• Why ABSA started this team in the depths of the 2022 crypto winter and why they called it the "digital assets team," not the crypto team

• The counterintuitive insight from Robyn: compliance and financial crime were enablers, not blockers, the harder conversation was with tech

• Why custody was the correct first product: wallet infrastructure as the foundation for every downstream digital asset service

• How ABSA is thinking about institutional demand from Bitcoin strategic reserves to tokenized real-world assets that generate yield

• The rich data problem: when you can see a Bitcoin's entire transaction history going back a decade, what does that mean for risk and KYC policy?

• How ABSA embedded zero-knowledge proofs into its gold-backed stablecoin to serve privacy-sensitive institutional clients

• The cross-border stablecoin opportunity, and why the CASP regulatory framework in South Africa is creating clarity that other markets lack

• What expansion across ABSA's African footprint looks like now that the infrastructure is built

Key Quote: "The growth in stablecoins, crypto, and financial market infrastructure using blockchain are threats to pan-African and global banks like ours, and we need to respond." — Rob Downes

Connect with Us:

• Samora Kariuki (Host): https://www.linkedin.com/in/samorakariuki/

• Rob Downes: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-downes-a970931/

• Nkahiseng Ralepeli: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nkahiseng-ralepeli-46a962a6/

• Robyn Lawson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robyn-lawson-online/

Frontier Fintech: www.frontierfintech.substack.com