Nigerian businesses have long managed their finances across a patchwork of disconnected tools: spreadsheets for tracking spend, WhatsApp threads for approvals, email chains for invoices, with no single place to see the full picture. That is the problem Duplo was built to solve. And it is the same problem that brought Duplo and Wema Bank to the table.

Duplo, the number 1  financial operating system for African businesses, has partnered with Wema Bank to give ALAT by Wema Bank business customers access to a connected platform for managing their financial operations. The partnership was formally signed at a ceremony held at Four Points by Sheraton, Victoria Island, bringing together Wema Bank leadership, industry stakeholders, partners, and members of the press.

The Signing

Duplo’s CEO and Co-founder, Yele Oyekola, opened the ceremony by framing the partnership as something bigger than a business agreement between two companies.

 “Today is not simply about signing a partnership agreement. It is about bringing together two organisations with a shared belief: that Nigerian businesses deserve financial tools that are as ambitious and capable as the businesses themselves.”

Yele Oyekola, CEO and Co-founder, Duplo

He returned to that theme later in his address, laying out what success actually looks like for both teams going forward.

 “Our mission is to make financial operations simpler, more connected and more effective for African businesses. Success will not simply be measured by signing this agreement. It will be measured by the number of businesses we help, the hours we save their finance teams, and the growth we enable.”

Yele Oyekola, CEO and Co-founder, Duplo 

Signing on behalf of Wema Bank were Tunde Mabawonku, Executive Director, Finance and Digital Optimization, and Olusegun Adeniyi, Chief Digital Officer. Representing Duplo were Yele Oyekola and Tunde Akinnuwa, COO and Co-founder. The room also hosted zonal and branch managers from across the country, as well as partners, industry leaders, and members of the press.

The sentiment in the room from Wema Bank’s side pointed in the same direction: a bank that has built its reputation on digital-first thinking, choosing to extend that thinking to how its business customers manage money day-to-day, not just where they keep it.

What This Means for ALAT Business Customers

In practice, this means a business using ALAT by Wema will be able to log into a connected Duplo dashboard and run its everyday financial operations without opening five different tools to do it. Here is what the integration brings together in a single workflow:

•       Local payments, powered directly by Wema Bank’s infrastructure, so money moves without leaving the platform a business already trusts.

•       Expense management and approvals, replacing scattered receipts and WhatsApp approval chains with structured workflows and spending limits set in advance.

•       Invoice generation and collections, so businesses can issue compliant invoices and get paid without a separate system for billing.

•       Vendor payment automation, built for businesses paying dozens or hundreds of suppliers in a single cycle.

•       Real-time financial reporting, giving business owners and finance leads one place to see exactly where the money is, instead of reconstructing it after the fact.

•       Auto-reconciliation, which matches every payment to its corresponding record automatically, closing what is usually the most time-consuming task on a finance team’s calendar.

None of these are new ideas individually. What is new is that an ALAT business customer will be able to access all of them from one connected dashboard, tied directly to the bank account they already use.

One of the highlights of the event was a live product walkthrough led by Duplo’s Product Lead, Remi Ogunsanya, who walked the room through the full experience end to end. The room responded with questions from business owners and banking professionals eager to understand exactly how the integration changes day-to-day financial operations for their customers.

Beyond the Signing

It is worth stepping back from the ceremony for a moment, because the significance here goes beyond one bank and one platform. For a long time, the assumption in financial services has been that banks and fintechs compete for the same territory. What happened at Four Points by Sheraton was closer to the opposite: a bank leaning on a fintech’s product depth, and a fintech leaning on a bank’s trust, distribution, and infrastructure, to solve a problem neither could solve as well alone.

That is the model Duplo’s leadership pointed to directly: the future of financial services in Nigeria, and across Africa more broadly, will not be built by banks or fintechs working in isolation. It will be built through exactly this kind of collaboration, anchored around a real, specific customer problem rather than a press moment.

For Wema Bank, it means ALAT customers get more reasons to keep deepening a relationship they already have. For Duplo, it means reaching business owners at the exact moment they are already managing money, inside the app they already open every day. For the businesses themselves, it means one less system to manage and a few more hours back every month.

How the Rollout Works

The integration will not appear for every ALAT business customer overnight. Duplo and Wema Bank confirmed that the experience will roll out first to an initial group of ALAT business customers over the coming weeks, with both teams working closely with that group to refine the experience before it becomes more broadly available.

As part of the launch, existing ALAT business customers will get three months of complimentary access to manage their business expenses on the platform, a window designed to let businesses feel the difference before committing.

The afternoon closed with networking and lunch, business cards changing hands, and small groups still talking through the details of what they had just watched on stage.

This Is What Connected Finance Looks Like

Nigeria’s business landscape does not have a shortage of ambition. What it has had a shortage of is infrastructure that keeps up with it.

For too long, growing businesses have spent too much time stitching together spreadsheets, WhatsApp threads, and disconnected tools to manage their finances. This partnership is a direct answer to that problem: a single connected platform tied to a bank account you already use, handling payments, expenses, approvals, reconciliation, and reporting in one workflow.

Duplo and Wema Bank are not building for the business that is struggling to survive. They are building for the one that is ready to scale, and needs its financial operations to scale with it.

That is the real announcement from the signing ceremony. Not a product launch. A starting point.

Visit tryduplo.com to learn more.