Nikolai Barnwell: Why PawaPay bet on mobile money over cards, and stayed out of the fintech boom

Episode overview:

Nikolai Barnwell has been resident in Kenya since 2009, and he watched the African mobile money story arrive in real time. Fresh out of university, he joined the early Africa-focused fund 88mph as a programme manager, helping build what is now Nairobi Garage, and got a front-row seat to roughly 50 investments over five years. Most went nowhere.

The ones that did, betting business BetPawa among them, taught him something more durable than any single exit: the shape of how mobile money and mobile internet would spread across the continent, market by market, with a lag you could almost set your watch by.

In conversation with Andile Masuku, Barnwell traces the line from that vantage point to PawaPay, the pan-African payments business he now runs. The throughline is a refusal to confuse the label for the thing. "Fintech" is too broad to mean much, he argues. What PawaPay actually does is narrower and harder: make it possible for businesses to transact across a fragmented continent, owning the technology end to end rather than stitching together other people's connections.

Barnwell's reflections on venture capital, the founder-funder incentive mismatch, and PawaPay's decision to stay out of the last fintech funding boom were previewed in the companion op-ed, Are founders and funders on the same page? Notes from an unreleased PawaPay conversation. This episode opens up the rest: the mobile-money-over-cards thesis, the direct-integration moat, the customer base that runs from ride-hailing to remittances, and a candid back-and-forth on stablecoins and the limits of central bank control.

Key insights:

On why "fintech" is a near-useless qualifier: Barnwell's opening move is to dismantle the category that frames the whole conversation. Almost every business today touches finance and technology, so claiming to be a fintech says little. The useful question is which specific problem you solve. For PawaPay, it is the one businesses cannot avoid: in order to sell, you have to be able to collect, and on a continent where most transactions are still cash and the payment landscape is splintered across markets, collecting at scale is genuinely difficult.

On betting mobile money over cards: PawaPay deliberately touches no credit cards at all. Barnwell's reasoning is that the card is a technology from the 1970s, shoehorned into modern infrastructure by legacy rather than fit, and weighed down by messy settlement, complex schemes, fraud, and cost. Where a market can leapfrog straight to something better, he sees little reason for cards to claim a meaningful share. So PawaPay built its core rails around mobile money as the alternative financial infrastructure, a bet on where consumer payments are heading rather than where they have been.

On owning the technology as the actual moat: The continent's payments market splits into a handful of genuinely pan-African players and many smaller local providers serving one or two countries deeply. PawaPay sits in the first camp with a distinguishing choice: no downstream partners. It integrates directly into the mobile money wallets across its markets rather than reselling other providers' connections. For a payments business living on slim margins and dependent on volume, that direct, broad footprint and end-to-end quality control is what separates it from the aggregators.

On the customer base nobody pitches: What PawaPay collects and disburses reveals more than any deck. Beyond the betting companies that anchor its volume, it serves ride-hailing operators like Yango and Bolt, cash-transfer outfit GiveDirectly, broadcasters DSTV and Canal+, international money transfer operators moving remittances in, and, notably, the Jehovah's Witnesses. The common thread is organisations that need the mobile money infrastructure to simply work across twenty-odd countries, and would rather not build and babysit that plumbing themselves. The hard part, Barnwell stresses, is not the integration but the operat