Banks, payment companies, microfinance institutions, and fintechs sit at the centre of Africa's investment story, and so do the institutions that back them. We help these firms and lenders answer the critical questions: where a market is heading, which rails and players can get it there, and what has to change, in strategy, in capability, in policy, for a programme or an investment to flow.
We work at two levels. At the sector level, we run the diagnostics and build the strategies that shape major programmes, mapping payments and lending value chains, assessing fintech and inclusion ecosystems, engaging regulators, and turning the findings into the policy and technical-assistance roadmap an operation is built on. At the institution level, we architect the transformations, open banking, digital lending, and payments, and the commercial strategy and value-creation plans that lift an individual bank or portfolio company. Fluent across Anglophone and Francophone Africa, we work close to where these programmes are designed and delivered.
How we work
We work as embedded partners rather than detached advisers, sitting inside the institution's own process so that our recommendations survive contact with the committees that have to approve them. We start from the decision that needs to be made, a strategy to set, a market to diagnose, a programme to shape, and work backwards to the analysis, the evidence, and the engagement plan that gets it there. Because we have been the people on the other side of the table, designing programmes and challenging quality at entry, we build materials that anticipate the questions before they are asked, and we stay engaged through implementation rather than handing over a report and stepping away.
- Investment readiness support
- Digital financial inclusion
- SME finance and trade finance programs
- Fintech, merchant acquisition, payments
- Market and credit infrastructure
Strengthening the institutions that intermediate capital
Banks, DFIs, and funds are how capital reaches the real economy. We work on the strategies, diagnostics, and capability that let them originate more, manage risk better, and reach further.
What is shaping Financial Services
Mobile money has become core financial infrastructure, not a niche
Sub-Saharan Africa transacted roughly $1.4 trillion through mobile money in 2025, with merchant payments the fastest-growing use case, expanding by close to half to $155 billion as active accounts and regular usage climbed.
For banks and fintechs, the contest has shifted from acquiring wallets to monetizing transactions, embedding credit, and interoperating with merchants and incumbent banks. Investors backing payments platforms need diligence that tests merchant economics and interoperability, not just user growth.
The MSME finance gap keeps widening, with women-owned firms hit hardest
The MSME finance gap across emerging markets is now estimated at roughly $5.7 trillion, having grown about 27 percent as demand outpaced supply, and women-owned businesses account for around 34 percent of that shortfall, close to $1.9 trillion.
The gap is a financing opportunity for institutions that can underwrite it. Banks, DFIs, and funds that build credible SME and gender-smart lending propositions, backed by risk-sharing and blended structures, can deploy at scale where demand is proven and competition is thin.
Gender-smart and blended finance is moving from pilot to institutional allocation
Catalytic and blended instruments are increasingly being used to de-risk women-led enterprises at scale, with the African Development Bank's AFAWA initiative backed by a $618 million G7 guarantee and targeting up to $5 billion in financing for women-led businesses.
DFIs and investors face rising expectations to structure gender-smart capital that is rigorous on impact and commercially sound. Institutions that can design the de-risking layer, set the impact metrics, and stand up follow-on facilities will attract concessional and commercial co-investment.
In payments, we led the digital-payments ecosystem strategy for one of Central Africa's largest markets, mapping the full value chain across seven commercial banks, every major mobile-money operator, and the payment gateways, fintechs, and telecoms that connect them. That work directly informed a $480 million operation and set the direction for the market's shared payments infrastructure.
We do the same strengthening work at the level of the individual institution and the wider ecosystem. For a regional bank, we architected an open-banking transformation, designing the API framework, the fintech-partnership model, and a PSD2-aligned customer-experience redesign; and across a group of banks, mobile-money operators, microfinance institutions, and fintechs, we built a digital-lending scale-up strategy that ran from sector and ecosystem mapping through regulator engagement to the recommendations that shaped the next phase of a national financial-inclusion strategy.
On the investor side, we led commercial due diligence for a private-equity firm's acquisition of a major African fintech platform, then redesigned its corporate strategy, value-creation levers, and growth roadmap in a post-acquisition transformation toward a valuation above $2 billion.
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