A Manhattan federal judge, Jennifer L. Rochon, unfroze $57.6 million in USDC stablecoins tied to the Libra meme coin scandal, allowing promoters Hayden Davis and Ben Chow to regain access.
The decision was based on the defendants’ cooperation and the judge’s skepticism about the plaintiffs’ likelihood of success in their class-action lawsuit seeking over $100 million in damages. The Libra token, launched in February 2025 and promoted by Argentine President Javier Milei, crashed 97% within 24 hours, sparking allegations of a $107 million rug pull.
The unfreezing led to a temporary spike in Libra’s price, with reports of a 103% to nearly 400% surge, though it later cooled. The lawsuit, filed by Burwick Law, alleges Davis and Chow misled investors by leveraging Milei’s promotion to falsely suggest legitimacy. The case remains ongoing, with no resolution on substantive claims.
The unfreezing of $57.6 million in USDC stablecoins, previously locked due to a class-action lawsuit, led to a temporary price surge for Libra, with reports of a 103% to nearly 400% increase shortly after the August 20, 2025, court ruling.
This spike reflects speculative trading driven by the news, as investors may have anticipated renewed liquidity or project developments. However, the price later stabilized, indicating the surge was likely driven by short-term sentiment rather than fundamental value.
Promoters Hayden Davis and Ben Chow regaining access to these assets could enable them to reinvest in liquidity pools or marketing efforts, potentially stabilizing Libra’s market presence temporarily. However, their involvement in the alleged $107 million rug pull and subsequent legal scrutiny raises concerns about their credibility, which could deter long-term investor confidence.
The unfreezing does not resolve the ongoing federal criminal probe or class-action lawsuit alleging fraud and market manipulation. Regulatory bodies, including the SEC and DOJ, are investigating potential securities violations and money laundering, which could lead to further restrictions or penalties.
This uncertainty hampers Libra’s ability to regain institutional or retail investor trust. The scandal, dubbed “Cryptogate,” has severely damaged Libra’s reputation, with 86% of traders losing $251 million and allegations of insider trading. The concentration of 82%-84% of the token supply in the hands of a few insiders further fuels distrust, making it difficult to attract new capital.
The unfreeze and ongoing investigations could exacerbate Argentina’s economic instability, as the scandal has already contributed to a 5% drop in the country’s stock market and eroded public trust in President Javier Milei, who promoted the token. This political fallout may limit Libra’s ability to secure legitimate partnerships or government-backed initiatives.
Why Libra Is Unlikely to Reach Its ATH
Libra was marketed as a tool to fund Argentine businesses, but its meme coin structure lacks intrinsic utility or a sustainable economic model. Unlike stablecoins backed by real assets or projects with clear use cases, Libra’s value was driven by hype and Milei’s endorsement, which has since been retracted.
Blockchain data revealed that 82%-84% of Libra’s supply was held by a small group of insiders who cashed out $87-$107 million during the initial crash. This centralization and the perception of a pump-and-dump scheme make it unlikely for retail investors to return in significant numbers, limiting upward price momentum.
The Libra collapse drained $251-$286 million in liquidity from the altcoin market without bringing in fresh capital, as it merely shifted funds from other assets. Memecoins like Libra often fail to recover after such crashes due to their reliance on speculative trading rather than organic growth. The broader crypto market’s focus on more established assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum further reduces Libra’s appeal.
The SEC’s investigation into whether Libra violated securities laws, combined with potential money laundering probes, could lead to delistings from exchanges or stricter regulations. The lack of transparency in the token’s launch and the absence of liquidity locks or fair launch mechanisms deter institutional investment.
Memecoins like $TRUMP and $MELANIA, which followed similar playbooks, lost 71%-90% of their value post-launch and failed to recover due to insider profiteering and lack of utility. Libra’s 89.4%-96% crash mirrors this pattern, and the market’s increasing skepticism toward politically endorsed tokens reduces its recovery potential.
Libra’s current trading price (around $0.12-$0.32 as of February 2025) is significantly below its ATH, with low trading volume ($62.45-$158 million daily) indicating weak market interest. Technical indicators, such as a neutral RSI and declining holder count (from 50,000 to 35,770), suggest limited momentum for a sustained rally.
Analysts predict a potential bull run in 2025, but this is likely to favor established cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, which could reach $200,000, rather than speculative memecoins. Libra’s lack of unique features or partnerships, combined with competition from other altcoins, makes it unlikely to capture significant market share.
Some analysts, like DigitalCoinPrice, project Libra could reach $0.50-$0.70 by the end of 2025, driven by a potential crypto bull market. However, these predictions are speculative and based on historical bull market trends, not Libra-specific developments. If Milei or other high-profile figures re-endorse Libra, it could spark another speculative surge.
However, Milei’s deletion of his initial endorsement and ongoing investigations make this unlikely. The unfrozen $57.6 million could be used to restore liquidity or fund development, but the promoters’ track record of alleged misconduct reduces the likelihood of this restoring investor confidence.
While the unfreezing of $57.6 million in assets triggered short-term price volatility, Libra’s path to its ATH of $0.75-$4.61 or a $4.5 billion market cap is obstructed by its lack of fundamental value, insider trading allegations, regulatory scrutiny, and a damaged reputation.
What began as a bruising corporate feud between Elon Musk and OpenAI is now pulling Meta into the legal storm, as the ChatGPT-maker asks the court to force Mark Zuckerberg’s company to hand over documents linked to Musk’s attempted takeover.
In a court filing made public Thursday, OpenAI revealed that it subpoenaed Meta back in June for records that could shed light on whether Zuckerberg or his company coordinated with Musk and his AI startup, xAI, during Musk’s unsolicited $97 billion bid to buy OpenAI earlier this year. The filing states that OpenAI’s legal team had learned Musk communicated with Zuckerberg about xAI’s interest in purchasing the company, including “potential financing arrangements or investments.” It remains unclear whether any such documents exist, and OpenAI ultimately rejected Musk’s approach.
Meta objected to the initial subpoena in July, prompting OpenAI’s lawyers to now seek a court order that would compel Meta to turn over the evidence. In addition to documents on Musk’s takeover attempt, OpenAI also wants access to Meta’s communications on “any actual or potential restructuring or recapitalization of OpenAI” — an issue at the heart of Musk’s lawsuit against the company.
Responding to inquiries, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone pointed to a section of the filing where OpenAI itself acknowledges that neither Meta nor Zuckerberg signed Musk’s letter of intent to acquire the firm. Beyond that, Meta declined further comment.
This legal tug-of-war comes against the backdrop of intensifying rivalry between OpenAI and Meta. In 2023, Meta poured resources into building a frontier AI model capable of outperforming OpenAI’s GPT-4, filings in a separate case revealed. But by early 2025, Meta’s AI projects were lagging the industry standard — reportedly infuriating Zuckerberg, who has since doubled down.
That spending spree means a court-ordered disclosure could carry significant financial implications for Meta. If Zuckerberg’s discussions with Musk touched on potential joint ventures or financing, the documents could reveal how seriously Meta weighed investing in or even acquiring pieces of OpenAI at a time when it was already funneling vast sums into AI. Any evidence showing overlap between Meta’s hiring strategy and Musk’s xAI ambitions could also raise questions among investors about whether the social media giant was hedging its bets or considering partnerships in the escalating AI arms race.
In recent months, the Facebook parent has escalated efforts by raiding talent from OpenAI itself. Among the biggest hires was Shengjia Zhao, a co-creator of ChatGPT, who now leads Meta Superintelligence Labs. Meta has also invested heavily in outside ventures, including a $14 billion stake in Scale AI, and has reportedly held talks with other AI companies about potential acquisitions.
That backdrop makes any possible coordination between Musk and Zuckerberg even more intriguing. Less than two years ago, the two billionaires exchanged barbs about fighting in a physical cage match — a spectacle that never materialized. Yet, the escalating arms race in AI may have pushed them closer to pragmatic cooperation, at least on paper.
The briefing made public on Thursday forms part of Musk’s wider lawsuit with OpenAI. The Tesla and SpaceX chief, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015, is challenging its restructuring into a for-profit entity with a public-benefit arm — a shift designed to attract deep-pocketed investors and pave the way for a potential IPO. Musk contends the move betrayed OpenAI’s founding mission and is seeking to derail it.
Meta’s lawyers, however, want the court to shut down OpenAI’s request for evidence, arguing that Musk and xAI themselves are better placed to provide the information. They also claim Meta’s internal discussions about OpenAI’s restructuring or recapitalization are irrelevant to Musk’s case.
In today’s Tekedia Daily podcast, I focus on effective enterprise AI strategy. The podcast emphasizes that AI is more than just a technological tool; it’s a catalyst for profound business transformation. A successful strategy must be built on four key pillars: having a clear vision tied to the company’s strategic goals, ensuring a quantifiable value realization, planning for widespread adoption, and proactively managing risk.
Furthermore, AI must influence all four key vectors of the business: customers, employees, technologists, and partners. This concept with AI at the heart – the AI centricity – ensures that all parts of the organization are interconnected and drawing from a shared AI-powered stack.
True success isn’t just about using AI to run existing processes; it’s about using it to transform the business model entirely. This requires redefining the roles of people, reinventing processes, and deploying new tools. The ultimate goal is to become an “AI-native” business, where AI is at the core of operations. Bank A used IT to replace typewriters, Bank B used IT to link all bank branches together, evolving a new business model where customer accounts are agnostic of location.
Good business is anchored on a great business model. The “One Oasis Strategy” highlights how a powerful, customer-facing product can create a loyal following that generates value in unexpected but highly profitable areas. Ultimately, the goal is not merely innovation for its own sake, but using AI to influence industrial intelligence and create products and services that customers genuinely love.
Podcast Video: Sign-up at Blucera and check Tekedia Daily podcast category under Training module.
Vibe coding won’t spell the end for productivity software — at least not anytime soon. That was the position of LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman during an episode of his Possible podcast released on Wednesday.
Vibe coding, a term coined earlier this year by OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy, refers to the growing practice of developers prompting AI systems to generate code. The approach has gained traction across Silicon Valley in recent months, with some companies even listing “vibe coding” as a necessary skill in their job postings.
Hoffman, however, cautioned against assuming that the rise of new technologies automatically means the decline of existing ones. Responding to a question on the longevity of tech shifts, he said people often “overpredict, in the new things, the death of the old.”
He pointed to the early years of mobile technology as an example. “A classic one is when mobile started growing, people said PCs are over. And what happens is PCs grow — like mobile grows a lot more — but PCs have continued,” Hoffman explained.
In his view, the same pattern will play out with vibe coding. Rather than wiping out productivity software, he believes the two will coexist and, in some cases, complement each other.
“For example, one of the memes right now is vibe coding is going to wipe out productivity software,” Hoffman said. “What I think you’ll see is productivity software will continue, and then vibe coding is going to add on to it.”
He added that the disruption won’t be immediate or absolute. “It’s not going to be like suddenly productivity software is going to go away. That’s the pattern that people need to understand.”
Hoffman, who is also a partner at venture capital firm Greylock Partners, underscored the point from an investor’s perspective. He said that emerging technologies often follow a cycle: they coexist with older systems for a while before eventually replacing them, but the replacement happens quickly when it does arrive.
“‘I want to bet on mobile, or I want to bet on, maybe, vibe coding,’” Hoffman said. “But it’s a very standard pattern that what happens is, it persists for a while. And then, by the way, when it dies, it dies very quickly, in a smaller number of years.”
The debate around vibe coding reflects a larger conversation happening in the software industry: whether AI-driven coding will fundamentally alter the way developers build applications and whether it signals the start of a new paradigm in productivity tools.
In fact, the landscape of productivity software already reflects Hoffman’s prediction of coexistence and integration rather than replacement. Microsoft, for instance, has not abandoned its flagship Office products but has instead layered AI on top of them through Copilot, an AI assistant that integrates with Word, Excel, and Outlook. Rather than vibe coding making Office irrelevant, the company is demonstrating how AI can enhance traditional productivity workflows.
Google is following a similar path, embedding its AI model Gemini into its suite of Workspace tools. Gmail can now draft responses automatically, Google Docs can generate or summarize text, and Sheets can analyze data patterns far faster than before. Here too, productivity software is not being displaced — it is being upgraded.
Even newer entrants like Notion, long considered a modern rival to legacy productivity apps, have embraced AI not as a side experiment but as a core feature. Its “Notion AI” can summarize meetings, draft project outlines, and manage knowledge bases within the same platform users are already accustomed to.
These examples show that rather than vibe coding sweeping away productivity tools, AI is becoming a complement to them — echoing Hoffman’s larger argument that new paradigms usually build upon existing ones before reshaping them.
“The wicked borroweth, and payeth not again: but the righteous sheweth mercy, and giveth” – Ps 37:21 (KJV)
“There is no peace, saith the LORD, unto the wicked” – Isaiah 48:22 (KJV)
The Ancient Greeks had a very interesting relationship with credit – renowned Greek philosopher Aristotle despised lending with interest (tokos), he called it “unnatural wealth creation” as money was seen as “barren” and not meant to “breed” more money1, centers of worships – particularly the Temple of Apollo (Greek god of music and poetry), acted as mini-banks by issuing credit to citizens, and borrowing money (and promptly paying it back) was a way to build and maintain your social status. Credit (with interest) was not completely outlawed from Greek society or non-existent in the case of the ancient Inca civilisation, but guardrails were designed to manage who could issue it, and how much could be charged as interest. Credit was a contentious topic more than 2,000 years ago; it still is today – some things just never change.
Regardless of what anyone tells you, credit issuance is by far the single largest revenue lever in the African financial services industry today. In Nigeria, the FUGAZ banks2 generated roughly N9.66trillion (US$6.03bn) in interest income in 2024 alone, credit reportedly makes up 20% of Moniepoint’s revenue profile, and more than 200 companies have registered with the FCCPC to become digital lenders. This is a market that has huge tailwinds acting in its favour; there are a ton of SMEs orphaned by traditional banks who require credit to stimulate their businesses, individuals without structured income sources who need loan facilities, and young people starting their careers who need money to furnish their apartments, get new gadgets and more importantly flex on their mates with a 2012 Toyota Camry. All of these components point to the massive opportunities embedded within the credit vertical alone.
A simple person reading this section will be tempted to think that starting a credit business is God’s call over his life (especially since his pastor said he will come across information that will change his life this week), however, just as a Boeing 737 can successfully transport 400 passengers across 3,450 miles from Heathrow, London to John F. Kennedy, New York in about eight hours, but if anything goes wrong can just as easily send all 400 passengers to the afterlife, a credit business can (depending on how things go) either get you a Tesla or end up testing your patience (p.s: this was honestly the best Tesla car joke that came to mind while writing this). Why this happens is quite simple – the credit dependent and interconnected nature of developed markets like the United States and Europe means that taking a loan and not paying back (or paying back late) has real consequences. A bad credit score can make it impossible for you to buy the new iPhone 17 when it comes out in September, change your car, or in more serious cases own a home – all of which can be highly undesirable. Without developing repayment infrastructure to manage credit obligations, these default consequences are enough to keep people on their feet and focused on clearing their credit obligations when due.
If you are reading this from Nigeria, you know very well that “consequence infrastructure” of this scale does not exist in Nigeria. In Nigeria, a person can plead with you and be very obsequious just before they get a facility from you, they may even say a short word of prayer for you when you finally give them the loan, but when repayment day comes you may start to hear things like “is it because of <insert loan amount> you’re disturbing me”, “how much is the money sef? (a rhetorical question he fully well knows the answer to)” and maybe the worst of all “even Nigeria dey owe (as if the N149.49 trillion (US$93.4billion) debt profile of a sovereign oil producing country is a laudable achievement worth emulating)”.
This lack of infrastructure creates two broad challenges: one, low-interest credit from low-risk appetite lenders (see deposit money banks) remains largely inaccessible to SMEs and individuals who genuinely intend to pay back, and two, a lack of market consolidation3 within the SME and consumer credit verticals.
The main reason we have hundreds of disparate consumer lending fintechs with high interest loans, horrible user interfaces, and exceptionally uncreative names like SharkCredit, LoanTiger and CreditElephant is because a single infrastructure layer that allows everyone connect and compete on user experience, product performance and distribution doesn’t exist, this single infrastructure layer is the missing link required to drive credit penetration in Nigeria from 14% to 40%, this single infrastructure layer is the key to improving business outcomes for small businesses, and this single infrastructure layer is the key to birthing Nigeria’s first all-credit unicorn. This single infrastructure is quietly being built.
Credit 3.0
The credit ecosystem, similar to the payments ecosystem in Nigeria has evolved significant over the years. Two main phases have characterised this evolution – Credit 1.0 and Credit 2.0:
Credit 1.0 was lenders issuing credit on the back of physical collateral (properties, cars, etc.) and stringent know your customer requirements (bank account statements, international passport data page, etc).
Credit 2.0 was siloed lending underwriting on the back of data within the purview of the lender in question (i.e, Zenith Bank providing credit facilities to only Zenith Bank users).
Riding on the CBNs latest posturing regarding Open Banking, we are now gradually making the move to Credit 3.0: interoperable lending on the back of decentralized user data, fully digital repayment and disbursement rails, and a consequence layer that punishes bad behaviour.
The Credit 3.0 Infrastructure Stack
So, what does the credit 3.0 infrastructure stack look like? There are four main layers of this stack:
Underwriting Layer: the ability to verify whether a prospective borrower has the capacity to repay a facility being issued to them.
Digital Mandate Setup: the ability to set up fully digital debit authorisations on a borrower’s bank account in seconds.
Digital disbursement: the ability to send approved funds to a borrower’s account digitally
Consequence Layer: the layer that documents the journey from 1-3, deduces whether a borrower is good or bad, and feeds that information back into the underwriting layer.
To a very large extent, the digital disbursement bit has been around for a while. Account-to-account payment rails from companies like NIBSS, Remita, Interswitch, eTranzact, etc. have solved this problem more than 10 years ago. While the digital mandate setup layer has existed for years, the new direct debit API service from NIBSS that fintechs like Paystack, Flutterwave, Mono, and Lendsqr are adopting to complete their product propositions moves the mandate setup layer from previously being a semi-digital service to a fully digital one that completely eliminates the need for a user to visit a bank branch. The consequence layer exists in some form today via credit bureaus; however, an intuitive, fast, cheap, and interconnected way to capture, interpret, and share new information to improve end-to-end credit decision-making is still lacking.
The prospective August 2025 open banking roll-out announcement by the CBN is the key ingredient that moves the Credit 3.0 stack from 50% to 75% in 2025. A well-functioning open banking layer can significantly improve the underwriting ability of lenders. What the open banking roll-out message entails is that borrowers are no longer stuck with their banks or other stores of value providers for their credit needs, as they can now provide third-party access to their data across multiple banks for underwriting purposes. While all the banks are yet to provide open banking compliant APIs for third parties to consume, the addition of this layer to the Credit 3.0 suite will drive a new paradigm for credit issuance in Nigeria, and force more conservative lenders (with large user bases) to either improve their user experiences or risk losing customers to fintechs and other fledgling players.
Opportunity Waves
One of the most popular TED Talks on entrepreneurship is a 2015 talk by Bill Gross titled “The single biggest reason why start-ups succeed”. A key messages from that talk was the importance of timing and its role as a determinant of runaway success in entrepreneurship.
Timing as a key lever is a very amorphous variable to peg your entrepreneurship journey on. For one, what does timing actually mean? Was Facebook more successful than Myspace because it launched seven months later? Is OPay more successful than Paga because they were founded five years later or because Chinese money is not your mate (OPay reportedly raised a US$400 million Series C round in 2021), likewise is LemFi a runaway success in international remittances because 2020 was the God-ordained year to start a remittance company or because they were the only ones who could execute at scale (or possibly both)? I don’t think I have an articulate answer to these questions, I do, however believe that all breakaway successes in the technology industry are a mixture of great execution and the right “Opportunity Waves”.
Execution + Waves
Good execution is the secret to a good business, but good execution + the right opportunity wave is the secret to a great business that builds a long-term sustainable flywheel.
What are waves? A wave is a massive extenuating force that creates scalable market opportunities for businesses within a specific vertical. More often than not, waves tap into a latent customer demand for a specific need that hasn’t been met (or met properly).
All great technology businesses within the Nigerian and broader African clime are a product of some type of wave or another:
Technology Induced Waves: a new product solves an existing need in a novel way that unlocks massive latent customer demand, i.e, Paystack, Flutterwave.
Regulatory Induced Waves: a policy direction unlocks a new market opportunity that didn’t exist hitherto, i.e, Appzone, Remita, Interswitch, new generation banks of the 90s, etc.
Transferred Waves: someone does the hard work of creating a market but is unable to capture it due to weak execution (think Jacob taking Esau’s birthright), i.e, Chowdeck, OPay, Moniepoint, etc.
New Model-induced waves: a rethink of how a certain process should work unlocks latent demand for a solution to that problem, i.e, Moove, PiggyVest, etc.
Credit 3.0 will create a massive wave that will open four major doors.
The Credit Infrastructure Layer: This layer will underpin the entirety of credit 3.0, allowing lenders to check creditworthiness across all banks (and possibly stores of value), disburse funds, and manage repayments all via a single set of API tools. Being an infrastructure provider is sexy on paper – for instance, hearing that NIBSS supports more than 90% of the Nigerian ecosystem’s funds transfer volume sounds mouth-watering, but earning asymmetry in technology markets has a way of pushing the infrastructure provider to the bottom of the food chain. NIBSS is a cash cow, no doubt, but when you hear that banks mark up the N3.75 they are charged by NIBSS with N6.25, N21.25, and in certain cases N46.25, it becomes pretty obvious that having some kind of user-facing play may not necessarily be a bad idea. The credit infrastructure layer will create a similar asymmetry. The infrastructure provider will charge a fixed amount for the multiple API calls that power these transactions (and probably take a percentage cut on the direct debit repayments), but the vast majority of the value will be captured by the lenders who take on the non-trivial risk of taking this to market. My guess is that some of the players at the credit infrastructure layer will eventually find ways to forward integrate (lend directly to users based on their existing infrastructure).
Consumer/SME credit ecosystem consolidation: a single plug-in infrastructure for lending will create a level playing field for digital lenders and drive huge displacement effects. Users will naturally (without any coercion from regulators) flock to credit providers with sleek user interfaces, great technology, and novel business models, as opposed to archaic credit providers with ugly and uninspiring user interfaces. This will ultimately lead to consolidation around a handful of players (two or three companies) and the decimation of “unserious players”. This is a good outcome for users, regulators, and the discerning investors who have either already placed bets on these companies (as I suspect the proposed three winners are probably already operational today) or are going to.
The Consequence Layer: in the future (and if everything goes according to plan), we will not need to force people to repay loans by slapping debit mandates on their bank accounts – creating a consequence layer that punishes deviation and rewards compliance will drive a new era for this market by making the idea of borrowing money and not paying back a very bad one. The consequence layer will connect to the credit bureaus (if it isn’t actually one itself) and provide an integrity verification service that doesn’t just let borrowers verify creditworthiness, but also allows your future landlord, your future employer and even your future spouse verify if housing you is a potential gaffe, employing you comes with inherent risks, or marrying you is a bad idea. Whether a standalone company will be founded to take this up or one of the existing credit bureaus rises to the challenge is not clear as of now, but one thing is for sure: it’s going to happen, and it may be sooner than we expect.
Ancillary services: Credit 3.0 will unlock a plethora of novel services and product offerings – BNPL will finally become very practical. I see a world where Moniepoint (or any other provider with similar distribution) can set up a BNPL channel on their terminals:
Users choose to pay via the BNPL channel
They get a notification that prompts them to provide their BVN
If the checks are successful, they get a notification to set up a mandate on their account.
If step c is successful, value is offered to the customer, and repayments start immediately.
This may obviously not be optimal for quick service restaurants and malls, but it will be good for white goods purchases and other merchants that aren’t plagued with in-store queues.
BNPL is just one of such possible services. We may eventually see the birth of credit cards that work at scale for users of all kinds. Models that disburse credit to small businesses, issue them payment terminals, and collect repayments as a fraction of payments processed on said terminals, making repayments feel easy (this already exists today, btw, making this work at scale is the objective).
The Playbook
While Credit 3.0 contains a ton of opportunities, its success is largely dependent on the Central Bank keeping its word and “forcing” the banks to provide open banking APIs that fintechs and other entities can plug into to complete their propositions.
While we’re waiting for the CBN, players are already taking positions – Paystack and Flutterwave have built layer 2 and 3 and will likely take a shot at building layer 1 out when the APIs are live, I expect Mono and Lendsqr to thread a similar path – the former because they will do anything to stay alive, the latter because their founder is one of the first Apostles of Open Banking. We cannot ignore the likes of OnePipe and a plethora of other CBN-licensed companies who will connect to the NIBSS direct debit API for repayments and connect to other payment rails for disbursement. So, while the opportunity is large, no one is folding their hands waiting for someone else to take it from them.
Conclusion
The future of financial services from a credit perspective is about to change drastically. Unless the CBN reneges on its August 2025 deadline and doesn’t go through on its promise, the potential for consumer and SME lending in a post-open banking world is massive, the revenue opportunity is mouth-watering, and its ability to drive massive displacement at all levels is worth it. Can’t wait to see how it all pans out.
Inspired By The Holy Spirit
One of my grandmother’s favorite quotes is “you use money to make money”. Safe to say Aristotle would not have liked her.
FUGAZ banks refer to the top 5 tier 1 banks in Nigeria: FirstBank, UBA, GTBank, Access, and Zenith Bank.
Market consolidation speaks to the tendency for technology markets to converge around a handful of winners – Payment Gateway (Paystack & Flutterwave), Agency banking (Moniepoint & OPay), Consumer savings (PiggyVest & Cowrywise), etc.
