The most foolish thing I hear often is that Africa’s fintech market is flooded with solutions. People have no way to move money across borders within the continent.

For a population of 1.3 billion people, we have a handful tech solutions for cross border transfers in West and East Africa. A few old school web based apps in Southern Africa

Then we have the story that there’s too many loan apps. Stop looking at Kenya (and sometimes Nigeria) and calling it Africa. Formal credit penetration is a paltry 7%.

Telcos and banks have built some credit solutions but they’re too restrictive and not available in most markets. Again, Africa isn’t Kenya, Uganda, Ghana and Nigeria.

Africa is a lucrative market. It’s massive, untapped, growing not much competition and mobile money has taught us that we LOVE phone based finance.

Let’s build. The finance space is huge and we haven’t made a scratch. Not even a slight dent both in B2C and B2B.

We just love looking for and fighting the competition. An investor asked me how we will handle trading competition. I had no answer, there’s 4 apps concentrated in Nigeria and probably expanding soon to Ghana and Kenya. The natural progression.

Even with a small class of people who would trade, do you really think 4 apps can serve Africa? Forget winner take all, take what you can in markets you know.

It takes long to build good companies. It takes longer to build in Africa. Sometimes people forget that Monzo, Monese and Revolut have been around for 5 years. Nubank and Cashapp for 7 years.

But you start small small neobank play in Lagos or Kampala and commentators are quick to write you off. Founders want to be Cashapp after 2 years.

And investors fuel this foolery. Calm down, don’t die. The future is bright. Do good things, treat people well.

This doesn’t mean you’ll do well even when you’re playing around. You’ll die. But don’t despair if you do good work.