👨🏿‍🚀TechCabal Daily – A Ripple in Flutterwave

In partnership with Lire en Français اقرأ هذا باللغة العربية Happy mid-week Looking for a job in African tech? We’re putting fresh focus on the TechCabal Job Board , where you’ll find active openings from startups, fintechs, telecoms, venture capital firms, and other companies across the continent. We’ll update the board every week with new roles and remove outdated listings to keep opportunities current. Hiring? We’d like to help. Recruiters and hiring managers can submit open roles through this form , and we’ll feature suitable roles on the board for thousands of professionals across Africa’s tech ecosystem. Whether you’re looking to make your next career move or find the right talent for your team, the TechCabal Job Board is built to make those connections easier. Get smarter about Francophone Africa with our newsletter, Francophone Weekly—the startups, tech policies, and institutions building the pipelines for ecosystem growth. Subscribe Chimoney is getting acquired CBN has new rules Flutterwave raises a Series E from US-based Ripple Egypt is building a new data centre World Wide Web 3 Opportunities regulation CBN has new rules for banks and fintechs Image: Tenor Nigeria’s financial institutions have spent the last few years trying to become ‘everything’ apps, i.e., they want to serve customers and merchants, offer payments, banking, lending, and everything possible in the financial ecosystem. Nigeria’s Central Bank (CBN) has had a look at that trend and said not so fast. Here’s what happened: In a circular released on Monday, the regulator outlined new sets of rules on who owns payment companies, where payment data is stored, and how much of the payments ecosystem any one player can control. Tell us who calls the shots: The CBN now wants payment companies to disclose their ultimate beneficial owners—the people who control a business, even when ownership is buried beneath holding companies or some complex corporate structures. Keep payment data at home: From January 2027, payment transaction data generated in Nigeria must be stored on servers located in Nigeria. The goal is visibility and control. If payment data lives abroad, regulators have less oversight over it. Now, that doesn’t mean every company must build its own data centre. Operators can use local cloud providers and data centre facilities run by Rack Centre, MainOne, Open Access Data Centres (OADC), MTN, and other local infrastructure providers. You can’t dominate both sides of payments: This is the rule that could reshape competition. The CBN says any institution controlling more than 25% of the consumer payments market cannot hold more than 15% of the merchant acquiring market, and vice versa. This means that if a financial institution becomes dominant in consumer payments (bank accounts, cards, or wallets), it won’t be allowed to build an equally dominant position in merchant payments, which includes payment gateways and infrastructure or PoS terminals. What’s all this for? Nigeria’s digital payments ecosystem processed ₦1.2 quadrillion ($884.78 billion) in 2025. These rules are CBN’s blueprint for keeping Nigeria’s payments ecosystem from becoming too dependent on foreign infrastructure or difficult to supervise. We Have Secured the Bank of Ghana EPSP Licence. Fincra has officially secured its Enhanced Payment Service Provider licence. This regulatory milestone authorizes Fincra to directly collect, process, and settle payments in Ghanaian Cedis, offering a highly streamlined financial pipeline for businesses operating within the region. Start here . companies Flutterwave raises a Series E from US-based Ripple Image: Tenor Nigerian fintech unicorn, Flutterwave, has raised a Series E round at a $3.25 billion valuation after securing a ‘strategic investment’ from Ripple, the US payments company behind the XRP Ledger and RLUSD stablecoin. The company isn’t disclosing how much Ripple invested, but the deal gives Ripple an equity stake in Flutterwave and bumps up its valuation from the $3 billion it reached during its 2022 Series D round. Are Series E rounds even a thing in Nigeria anymore? Not really. Nigeria’s startup ecosystem hasn’t seen many large late-stage raises in recent years. One of the last headline-grabbing examples was software company Andela’s $200 million raise in 2021 . According to data from Briter Intelligence, early-stage deals have dominated African startup funding activity by volume in recent years as investors became more cautious. That’s why Flutterwave raising fresh capital at a higher valuation is notable. What changes with this round? Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin and the XRP Ledger will now plug into Flutterwave’s infrastructure, allowing merchants and customers to send, hold, and convert money using stablecoins. The company expects the partnership to increase stablecoin transaction volumes on its platform. For Flutterwav