Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa are among the fastest-growing digital banking markets anywhere in the world right now. That growth is not being captured by the traditional banks that have served these markets for decades. It's being captured by mobile-first challengers and mobile money platforms that reached customers the incumbents couldn't reach fast enough. I've watched this exact dynamic play out in the Middle East, and the underlying cause is the same one.

It's tempting to read this as a story about disruptive upstarts outcompeting slow incumbents on innovation. That's not quite what's happening. It's a story about infrastructure - and it's why I see Africa as a genuine growth priority for Terafin, not a side market we get to eventually.

The asset traditional African banks already hold

Traditional banks across these markets hold something the mobile-first challengers don't: banking licences earned through years of regulatory relationship-building, real balance sheets, existing customer relationships built on trust, and branch and agent networks that reach communities a pure digital play has to spend years and enormous capital trying to reach. In markets where financial inclusion still has real distance to cover, that physical and relational footprint is not a legacy liability - it's an asset competitors would kill for.

What these banks don't have is a core banking system built for how customers now want to be served: API-first, real-time, mobile-native. Most of these cores were built for a branch-and-ledger model, the same as their Middle East counterparts, and the mobile money platforms and neobanks competing for the same customers were never burdened with that legacy in the first place. That's the entire gap.

The challengers didn't out-bank the incumbents. They out-built them on infrastructure the incumbents never had to build before now.

Why a core replacement is the wrong first move

The instinctive response - replace the core - carries the same risk profile in Lagos, Nairobi, or Johannesburg that it does in Riyadh or Abu Dhabi. It's a multi-year commitment layered on top of a live, regulated institution, and it asks a bank to bet its operational stability on a programme that won't show results for years. For banks that need to respond to competitive pressure now, that timeline is the problem, not the solution.

The faster, lower-risk path is the same one we've deployed in the Middle East: a cloud-native Digital Innovation Layer deployed above the existing core, not replacing it. The core keeps doing what it does. The layer on top handles the modern product experience - virtual accounts, multi-currency wallets, and genuinely digital-first customer journeys - and gets a bank from legacy constraint to competitive product in months, not years.

  • Launch virtual accounts and digital onboarding without a core data migration.
  • Offer multi-currency wallets that meet demand from customers transacting regionally and internationally.
  • Compete directly with mobile money and neobank experiences on speed and usability, while retaining the licence, balance sheet, and trust the challengers don't have.
  • Deploy in months against a live core, not years against a replatforming programme.

Why this is a Terafin priority, not an afterthought

Our mandate is Middle East and Africa together, deliberately. Our orchestration platform, the system we deploy, is a proven, production-grade, cloud-native system already running in regulated banking environments globally - it isn't a concept being tested for the first time in an African market. What a globally headquartered platform vendor can't provide on its own is the regulatory fluency and local delivery expertise each market actually requires. That's the role Terafin plays: the authorised regional engagement partner that brings a proven platform into African institutions with the on-the-ground judgment to deploy it correctly, market by market.

The banks in Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa that recognise this now - that their licence and customer base are the advantage, and their core is the only real constraint - are the ones that will still be setting the pace in this market five years from now. That's the conversation I want to be having with African bank leadership today, not after the growth we're all watching has fully shifted to the challengers.