African fintech has firmly established itself as a global leader, backed by both capital flows and market fundamentals. In 2025, tech startups across the continent attracted around $4.1 billion in combined equity and debt, with the fintech segment still the largest equity segment[1]. In short, there is a significant opportunity in a market that’s far from saturated. There are, says McKinsey, a plethora of untapped opportunities that include cross-border payments, SME lending and embedded, sector-specific solutions[2]. However, says Mandla Mbonambi, CEO of Africonology, fintech innovation is outpacing the sector’s ability to plug it into old systems. 

“As a result, the real constraint to change has become integration,” he continues. “Legacy systems were not designed for real-time, API-driven products and data is scattered across channels and back-office systems, limiting personalisation and cross-sell opportunities, as well as governance, security and efficiencies.” 

While on the one hand, the market has depth, velocity, and real-world relevance, on the other, it is entering a complex phase of growth in which its essential fintech integration is being implemented correctly. And this is where the real bottleneck now sits. 

As instant payments, digital wallets, embedded finance and platform-based services accelerate, many companies are still trying to push modern experiences through ageing core banking systems, fragmented data estates and integration layers held together by workarounds. Banks, mobile money operators, remittance companies and fintechs are increasingly offering new ways of banking and accessing funds, particularly around cross-border payments. Still, these solutions are also fragmented with high costs and delays. 

“This is not a pressure unique to Africa,” says Mbonambi. “But it is particularly important here because the continent has moved so rapidly in financial innovation. If Africa wants to continue leading in this sector, integration has to become a strategic priority. Legacy system integration is a persistent obstacle, with challenges that include poorly managed data migration, incompatible system architectures, and insufficient testing protocols.” 

Companies need a strategic framework that aligns technology investments with business objectives while still ensuring smooth integration across the enterprise. Innovation at the front end has become relatively easy to showcase. A new lending feature, a smarter onboarding journey, a slicker payments interface, and an AI-driven customer layer are visible wins. The harder work happens underneath, where systems need to talk to one another cleanly and reliably. 

MuleSoft’s 2025 Connectivity Benchmark shows how widespread this issue has become: the average enterprise now runs 897 applications, yet only 29% are integrated, and 90% say data silos are creating business obstacles. With IT teams spending close to 40% of their time designing, building, and testing custom integrations, it’s clear that integration debt has become one of the biggest brakes on digital and AI initiatives[3]. 

“You need processes that make sense, clean data and people who understand both the business and the technology. If you skip these steps, you’re just building an expensive way to make mistakes,” says Mbonambi. “Solving for these incoming bottlenecks translates into four immediate priorities: legacy modernisation, API enablement, integration as a service and platform expertise.”

Core systems do not always need to be ripped out. Still, they do need to be re-architected so old and new can coexist with less friction because careful integrations can allow old and new systems to coexist while protecting prior investments. API-led connectivity gives institutions a more flexible way to expose services, connect partners, orchestrate data flows and reduce the dependence on brittle point-to-point integrations. 

“Composable enterprise architectures built on API-led connectivity can reduce integration costs by 30% while creating reusable building blocks for innovation,” says Mbonambi. 

The third step is integration as a service to ensure organisations have integration capability embedded into delivery from the start, which is supported by governance, testing and visibility. Then, platform expertise wraps all the factors into a cohesive whole, providing a deep understanding of the business ecosystems and how to bring them together coherently. 
 
“Africa has already shown that it can lead in mobile money, digital payments and financial access,” concludes Mbonambi. “The next step is less glamorous, it’s process, process, process because the winners in fintech’s next chapter will be the ones that can connect core banking, customer channels, partner ecosystems and data in ways that are secure, scalable and commercially sustainable.”