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Flutterwave, the pan-African fintech startup, is in the midst of a global expansion. But as its platform finds news users in Europe and North America, the company faces a crucial balancing act.
Expanding the customer base leads to more profits, but also presents increasingly complex challenges. The company must navigate new rules and regulations even as it becomes an ever-greater target for cybercriminals due to its significance in the ecosystem.
As data thieves become more sophisticated, fintech companies like Flutterwave need to find creative ways to prevent thefts before they happen. At the same time, they must protect their users’ hard-earned money and personal information while simultaneously moving gigabytes of data every second.
Why Flutterwave Values Cybersecurity
Many startups focus on the process of scaling: New executives are hired, platforms are rearranged, intense marketing campaigns are staged behind the scenes.
In technology fields, the practice often supersedes everything else. It’s common to hear that scaling is the highest priority of chief executives, especially when a company is young and successful.
But Flutterwave is doing things differently.
The fintech platform launched in 2016 with a goal of serving enterprise clients in Africa. For years, multinational corporations had found working across the African continent unnecessarily cumbersome. Although Africa’s large, young population increasingly had access to modern technology, the patchwork of financial regulations from one country to another could hamstring businesses seeking to deliver services.
While working at a bank in Nigeria, Flutterwave founder Olugbenga “GB” Agboola realized a sophisticated fintech platform could solve many of the payment problems that plagued multinationals in Africa. Drawing on knowledge he gained from his years at PayPal and Google Wallet, he created a platform that handles all the financial hurdles and regulations for enterprise businesses, allowing them to seamlessly work across national borders in Africa.
The idea was an instant hit. Quickly, the startup partnered with the American ride-sharing service Uber to help it bring more jobs and opportunity to Africa. From there, things took off. Flutterwave grew quickly. By the time the startup finished its Series D fundraise in 2022, it received a valuation of more than $3 billion.
With that kind of capital at its disposal, Flutterwave was primed for accelerated growth. But instead of moving all its resources toward filling new offices in new markets, the company invested heavily in risk management. Recently, the company hired its first chief risk officer, who oversees Flutterwave’s heightened efforts on keeping data safe and secure for users around the globe.
While its internal investment was large — including self-audits, 24-hour platform monitoring, and meticulous attention to potential threats — the company realized one of the best ways to keep its clients’ data safe was to bring in even more outside help.
Partnering to Create a More Secure Internet
The thinking was simple: Preventing cybercrime everywhere will ultimately benefit the individuals and businesses that rely on Flutterwave’s fintech platform. That’s what led the company to partner with Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crime Commission to bolster its anti-fraud department.
The country’s EFCC aims to use the most sophisticated technology available to thwart the plans of cybercriminals and aspiring thieves throughout the nation and beyond.
By joining forces, Flutterwave will bring its own technological prowess and situational understanding to the commission in order to make the project more effective and robust.
“As the largest payments infrastructure company in Africa, we are committed to promoting secure and safe transactions. This initiative underscores our commitment to creating a fraud-free financial ecosystem and leading the charge in safeguarding transactions across Africa,” said Flutterwave founder Olugbenga “GB” Agboola. “We applaud the EFCC’s relentless efforts to combat internet fraud and other illicit activities in the financial sector.”
The EFCC focuses on advanced fraud detection and prevention, creating new policies that protect citizens and prosecute criminals, providing advanced training and opportunities to young people in Nigeria, and building a repository of tools that can assist investigators in hunting down and finding cybercriminals. This collaboration aligns with Flutterwave’s stance that fraud is an ecosystem problem and to tackle it effectively, all stakeholders need to come together.
Inside the Flutterwave DNA
The commitment to security is an added expense that consumers, ideally, will never notice. That extra cost without obvious benefit to the end user is one reason many firms across the globe have been reluctant to shore up cybersecurity operations. This growth-at-all-cost attitude has led to massive data breaches. Take, for example, the vulnerability in the transfer software made by MOVEit, which, in 2023, allowed hackers to gain access to the data of 60 million people across more than 2,000 organizations.
Even more famously, T-Mobile suffered a data breach in March 2023 that involved the private data of about 37 million people. This marked the eighth major successful attack against the company since 2018, including an incident in 2021 in which 76.6 million people’s data was exposed.
The African ecosystem also suffered a hit, but it’s important to note that no Flutterwave customer lost funds.
These kinds of problems have plagued myriad tech operations. Flutterwave, however, has worked from its foundation to ensure that its expansion never outpaces its security capacity.
Not only is data security crucial for families and businesses, whose futures can be completely changed with a few nefarious keyboard strokes, but cyberattacks also run the risk of destroying a business’s reputation and ability to do good work, said Ozoemena Nonso, a senior manager at Flutterwave.
“We understand how difficult it is to build trust and how easily it can come crumbling down like a pack of cards if care is not taken,” he said. “As a result, we have invested heavily in innovating around trust and creating a sense of security across all our customer segments.”
