Trust is infrastructure. And Africa’s fintech reckoning proves it – Salvador Anglada, Optasia Group CEO

For most of the past decade, African fintech was a land grab. Valuations rewarded user numbers, interfaces got flashier, and “disruption” was the pitch that attracted capital investment. From the outside, it was clear the model was running hotter than it could sustain. That era is over.

In every boardroom conversation, from Johannesburg to Lagos, the question has moved beyond “how fast can you grow?” to “what happens when things go wrong?”

The correction came quickly. African startup funding fell by nearly a quarter in 2024, high-profile ventures collapsed and investors pulled back – hard. But what followed was not a retreat – in 2025, total investment rose by almost 50% to $1.64 billion, even as the number of funded ventures fell and selection criteria tightened sharply. Africa was the only region globally where private capital deal volumes grew, with transactions rising by around 8% while global deal activity declined. Investment returned, but on different terms, so funders are now relying far more on debt and asset-backed facilities. Investors are paying for proven models, not promises of market dominance. 

This shift in investor sentiment mirrors a deeper, more fundamental truth: you cannot build a financial system that is based on hype. It needs to be grounded in trust. 

Why trust is not a soft metric
On a continent that has the fastest-growing population on Earth, as well as rapid digital adoption, the opportunities for fintech growth are abundant. But none of these opportunities can be realised where end users don’t trust digital services. Trust, in this context, is infrastructure – earned in the smallest increments, lost in an instant. Every cleared transaction, each fairly resolved dispute, and every instance of data handled with integrity builds it. But when money goes missing, terms change without explanation, or systems fail, this capital erodes immediately. 

When people don’t trust the system, it’s evident in how they handle their money. In South Africa, the Reserve Bank estimates that nearly half of all banked adults withdraw all their money as soon as it clears in their account, with a small but telling percentage saying they do so because they don’t trust the bank with their money. Across many emerging markets, where shocks are frequent and safety nets are thin, that instinct isn’t paranoia, it’s protection, because when an account is frozen or a payment doesn’t clear, it can undo years of careful saving for a family or small business.

This means building resilience in the financial system is a matter of survival for fintechs and their clients. As digital adoption grows, it also exposes how fragile many people’s finances are. For the professional, system failures are an annoyance, but for the farmer or small trader, they can be devastating. For them, the stakes could not be higher, given that around 70% of the workforce in the Middle East and Africa is one payday away from poverty, as per the latest ADP Research’s People at Work 2025 report.

But systemic resilience isn’t just about preventing technical failures; it is about ensuring the logic of the system doesn’t exclude the very people it was built for. This is where the industry’s approach to credit must evolve. 

What AI gets wrong in lending
The AI debate in financial services often centres on speed and efficiency, but what happens to the people on the wrong side of a model’s binary decision?  A basic credit model delivers a binary “yes” or “no”, often excluding large portions of populations with thin or non-existent formal credit histories, which are precisely the users fintech is meant to serve. Traditional AI often defaults to rejection because it views a lack of formal data as a presence of risk. This creates a blind spot, where millions of creditworthy individuals are shut out by rigid algorithms. 

The problem is that these models treat credit as a static status – you either qualify or you don’t – ignoring the fluid reality of the informal economy. By instead analysing real-time behavioural data, like the frequency of mobile wallet transactions or airtime top-up patterns, we can look past the “lacking” credit score to see a user’s seasonal cash flow and daily financial resilience. This shift in perspective allows for a more sophisticated model of dynamic affordability: one that doesn’t just ask if someone qualifies, but determines exactly how much they can borrow at that specific moment. This is the difference between deepening financial inclusion and replicating the exclusions of the traditional banking system in a new format. 

The partnership model replaces the platform wars
No single company can build this level of data-driven reliability alone. The era of the standalone platform – the “land-grab” model that attempts to own everything from user acquisition to proprietary tech – is over, because it simply ties up too much capital. The funding correction of 2024–2025 has effectively priced that approach out of the market. 

Structural partnerships are the new reality. We are moving away from territorial overlaps and towards comparative advantage. Telcos, banks, and retailers already own the customer proximity and the distribution networks. Specialist infrastructure providers deliver the heavy lifting: the data science, the underwriting, and the integration depth. When we combine these strengths, we don’t just lower the cost of inclusion, we build a system that works.

The results across dozens of markets are consistent: shared risk produces more durable businesses than solo expansion. 

Trust is everything
Giving people access is just the beginning. If a user doesn’t trust a tool to protect their money and data, they simply won’t use it. To build that confidence, pricing must be transparent enough to allay fears, systems reliable enough to keep money moving, and credit infrastructure needs to be both ethical and explainable.

When the system is clear, the user feels empowered. When people can move money easily and understand their obligations, they do more than transact, they build their lives on the system.

African fintech’s next chapter will not be written by the fastest movers. It will be written by the operators whose systems don’t fail the people who can least afford it. Code and capital get you into the market. Trust is what keeps you there.