Interswitch Group has reinforced its commitment to building the infrastructure required to enable sustainable financial innovation across Africa.
Speaking during a fireside conversation on the future of African fintech at The Borderless Experience 2026, organised by Condia and held in Lagos, Akeem Lawal, managing director, Payment Processing & Switching, Interswitch Purepay, highlighted the critical role of collaboration between fintechs, commercial banks, infrastructure providers and regulators in building a financial ecosystem that can scale without compromising trust, compliance or resilience.
In a conversation with Kemi Okusanya, CEO, Zest, moderated by Benjamin Dada, founder & publisher, Condia, Lawal emphasised that fintechs cannot and should not be expected to solve the challenges of financial innovation alone.
“I don’t think the fintechs can solve it alone,” he noted, underscoring the need for commercial banks and infrastructure providers to create the compliant and transparent layers that enable fintechs to focus on innovation.
For Interswitch, this represents a fundamental principle of Africa’s digital financial evolution: innovation is only as powerful as the infrastructure that supports it.
As fintechs continue to transform how individuals and businesses access and move money, trusted infrastructure providers have a critical role to play in enabling secure, compliant and resilient financial ecosystems. The collaboration between innovators, established financial institutions, infrastructure providers and regulators will therefore be essential to ensuring that Africa’s fintech revolution is not only rapid but also sustainable.
Lawal’s contribution at The Borderless Experience reflects Interswitch’s broader thought leadership on the future of payments and financial infrastructure across Africa – advocating for an ecosystem where innovation and infrastructure advance together.
In terms of what comes next for cross-border and contactless payments, he opined that trust remains the larger obstacle, since customers tapping a card without entering a PIN often assume the transaction is less secure than it actually is.
He concluded by emphasising that “the future of fintech is not simply about building revolutionary products. It is about building the infrastructure that allows that revolution to endure.”
