OPay, Paga, Others Makes CB Insights List of Promising Fintech Startups 2022

Nigerian-owned fintech startups, OPay, Paga and TeamApt make the annual CB Insights 250 list of promising fintech startups for 2022.

In the annual list, The Fintech 250, which comprises of 250 most promising private fintech companies in the world, OPay was ranked fourth out of the six African Fintech startups that made the list, with total funding of $570 million.

Paga and TeamApt with total funding of $38 million and $58 million were listed fifth and sixth, respectively

Jumo, a leading South Africa mobile payments company for banks and network operators, came first with $267 million. KuCoin, a cryptocurrency exchange platform registered in Seychelles, with $180 million in total funding was ranked second on the list of six most promising African fintech startups.

MFS Africa, a fintech company that connects service providers and customers in South Africa, with $281 million total estimated funding.

According to CB Insights, this year’s winners were chosen based on factors like proprietary Mosaic scores, funding, market potential, business relationships, investor profile, news sentiment analysis, competitive landscape, team strength, and tech novelty.

In addition, the report also noted that factors such as rising inflation, interest rate hikes, and struggling public tech stocks have made it more difficult for new and emerging fintech startups to make a dent in the already maturing fintech market.

OPay, Nigeria-Chinese owned most capitalised firm on the list, raised the most money but factors like the high inflation rate of 20.52%, interest rate of 15.5% and a weak local currency impacted the company’s ranking on the list. 

The same goes for MFS Africa, ranked below Jumo and KuCoin.

Paga is a leading mobile money company that is building an ecosystem to enable people to digitally send and receive money, and creating simple financial access for everyone.

TeamApt is Nigeria’s largest business payments platform, supporting over 400,000 businesses to get paid; processing $100 billion annualized run-rate transaction value, via its products – Moniepoint and Monnify.