The Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Flutterwave, Olugbenga Agboola, has maintained that the company remains committed to its planned Initial Public Offering (IPO) in spite of the current whirlwinds in the global digital payment space in order to realize its targets.
The fintech expert, who gave this hint in an interview with Bloomberg said that going public had become imperative for the company to attract large global clients.
According to him, this implies that if successfully issued, Flutterwave will be operating at the same level of compliance with the global clients.
The CEO explained: “There’s some kind of customers we’ll attract when we are public. The large global clients who need you to have the same level of compliance and level of global view that they have.”
Agboola, who debunked insinuations that the company’s management refused to honour former employees’ stock rights and that staff was harassed and bullied, maintained that these were “very, very isolated,” cases and they wouldn’t affect the planned IPO.
He further clarified that the company, which was recently embroiled in controversies in Kenya, had secured the approval of the country’s regulatory authorities for the first step in securing the right to operate in the country.
Noting that that “the markets aren’t great right now,” Agboola said that this may influence the IPO schedule
Bloomberg reported that while the CEO did not give an annual increase in total revenue of Flutterwave, he, however, disclosed that its payment processing business through its payments app, SendApp, increased 23-fold in the first half of this year when compared to the corresponding H1 2022.
According to the report, Agboola confirmed that payments through point-of-sale devices rose more than five-fold and revenue in its small and medium business unit also increased by almost fourfold.
The fintech expert, who foresees the company growing its presence in its existing markets and pushing the frontiers of its presence to other markets in the continent, said: “The goal is to make merchants across Africa, consumers across Africa use us more and know that we are the most reliable platform to use,” he said. “Africa is huge, the potential is huge.”
Flutterwave has since 2016 when it debuted in the digital payment space, rapidly expanded to about 30 African countries.
The firm that has its operational base in Lagos and San Francisco, has attracted investments from some venture capital firms, including Tiger Global Management LLC, and works with Alibaba’s Alipay, Uber Technologies Inc. and Netflix Inc., among others.
