How To Follow Olugbenga Agboola’s Path to Success

March 21, 2025 – It’s a fact of history that every success story feels inevitable. Looking back, it was clear Steve Jobs was a genius; of course, Microsoft would hit it big. But when Olugbenga “GB” Agboola started the African e-payments platform Flutterwave, the future looked far from certain.

From the beginning, the odds were stacked against the fintech business. It was created in Africa, not Silicon Valley. It was built for Africa, not the world. And it was started by a man who clawed his way up through the corporate ranks without family money or a well-known name.

And that’s exactly why Agboola’s story is so instructive.

Anyone can build a world-class company with millions of dollars and the right family connections. It’s much harder to craft a globally celebrated tech company through hard work, an understanding of the market, and sheer force of will.

But that’s precisely what Olugbenga “GB” Agboola did.

Learn From the Best

Before Agboola founded Flutterwave, he spent years toiling away in offices at some of the biggest companies in the fintech space.

A software engineer by training, it was during his daily nine-to-five job that Agboola learned how to understand the worldwide financial markets. He built his experience by working with some of the biggest and most successful companies in the fintech sphere.

Through his time at companies such as Google Pay and PayPal, Agboola honed a sense of how the most innovative companies build products and manage operations.

But he didn’t stop there. Agboola also held jobs at traditional financial institutions to better understand the needs and abilities of 21st century banks.

These lessons proved vital when he struck out on his own.

Practice Makes Perfect

Flutterwave wasn’t the first business that Agboola founded. Nor was it his first success. Before starting the e-payments platform, he drew on his engineering expertise and opened a small tech company in Great Britain.

“I have a software engineering background. I started my career with PayPal in the U.K., but prior to that, I had started a small Wi-Fi internet company in London, before Wi-Fi was a thing,” he said. “I was buying broadband from BT [British Telecom] and was reselling it back in the day. We’d configure our own wireless networks and do B2B wireless sharing. So I’ve always been a software engineer.”

His first business was a small success, but working at PayPal opened his mind to greater opportunities. Before he started a second venture, Agboola wanted to gain new perspectives on the market.

“From PayPal, I joined GT Bank in both Nigeria and the U.K., and then I went to Standard Bank, where I worked across Africa, building technology and products for the bank. I did a brief stint at Sterling Bank in Nigeria, where I was responsible for the electronics business, and then went to Google in the US, building a piece of Google Pay that became Google Tez for India. After Google, I built a small payments company in Nigeria that was acquired by a bank, which I joined,” he recalled. “After that, we started Flutterwave.”

Think Big, Start Local

Starting Flutterwave was far from a no-brainer. Agboola identified a need in the marketplace, but the problem he had to solve was amazingly complex. Even proposing the idea was ambitious.

While working in Nigeria, he noticed that enterprise corporations experienced frustration when coming to Africa. The patchwork of financial regulations caused delays in sending money across national borders — something that was easy in Western countries.

Agboola believed he could create a company that could act as an intermediary between corporations and governments, allowing digital money to move across nations at modern speeds. But the solution would require an immense workload. The company would have to work diligently with many governments while building a highly secure payments platform. It was a pie-in-the-sky idea.

“Payments is extremely broken in Africa, but it can be simple in Africa. And that obviously meant a lot of expansion that people did not even imagine possible,” Agboola noted. “We’re the largest payment network today in Africa. We have the most licenses in Africa today. We have the most reach in Africa today. But imagine what we required to do that, it’s a lot of work, a lot of expansion, infrastructure initiative, playbooks built, tried, tested, we used, discarded if it doesn’t work.”

But despite the Herculean effort, Agboola stuck to his goal. He began by working with the companies and government closest to him. And — just as important — he found a partner.

“Uber has been a customer that has defined our growth firm,” he said. “We supported Uber to scale across Africa, and we followed them into every market that they’re going into. So our expansion and growth story can be linked to our customer requirement, and it can also be linked to our philosophy about making payments simple across Africa and simplifying payments for endless possibilities.”

Respect Your Difference

While Olugbenga Agboola learned a lot about building solutions for highly wired Western countries, creating a fintech platform for Africa was a different challenge.

“At the beginning, we saw that payment in Africa is a bit different from payment everywhere else. The problems are different. Africa is highly fragmented when it comes to payments,” he shared. “Every payment system is unique and works well in its own country, but they’re not exported well beyond their shores. Obviously, we can’t just copy and paste a Silicon Valley or European model. We have to build what works for our environment.”

That approach allowed Flutterwave to avoid some of the common pitfalls that befuddle many entrepreneurs. Agboola didn’t try to build a “PayPal for Africa” because he knew that wouldn’t work. Instead, he worked on creating a unique solution, one that fit both his abilities and his solution. That’s another skill that’s vital for an entrepreneur, he said.

“While experience, I think, is great, I don’t think that is necessarily what makes a founder a great founder,” Agboola said. “Every founder’s journey is different. You can’t write out the DNA specifics for how a founder should come. It’s different. And everybody’s journey contributes in getting to where they are, where they’re going to be as they grow and scale the business.

“I’ve seen founders who drop out from school who are doing pretty well, I’ve seen founders who have experiences who are not doing well, founders actually who are doing really, really well as well. I’ve seen everything. So it doesn’t really matter. Different things shape different experiences, if you ask me.”

###

Sources:

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services/our-insights/leapfrogging-a-generation-talking-with-gb-agboola-ceo-of-flutterwave

https://docs.google.com/document/d/10JOAuz8CcAX4Q66RtX9SYMU0p27Zq2UMWo1dWroCUcs/edit?usp=sharing