Banks as distribution. Fintechs as infrastructure. It sounds like a clean division of labour. In reality, a B2B fintech bank partnership represents a fundamental shift in how banks and fintech companies can work together across Africa. In practice, this model has significant implications for how the next decade of African business finance gets built.

Last Friday, at The Borderless Experience by Condia, Duplo CEO and Co-founder Yele Oyekola joined a panel of industry leaders at Landmark Event Centre in Lagos to explore exactly this question. The panel was titled “Building the Customer Layer: What It Takes to Serve a Borderless Customer.” The argument that emerged from that conversation is worth examining beyond the event itself.

“Banks don’t have to build everything themselves,” Yele told the room. “Duplo has built a financial experience around the needs of mid-market and enterprise businesses. That creates an opportunity for banks to offer modern financial solutions to their customers without having to build every layer themselves.”

It sounds simple. It is actually a fundamental shift in how African business finance gets built, and who builds it.

The Problem This Reframing Solves

For the better part of the last decade, the narrative around African fintech and African banking has largely centred on competition. Fintechs move quickly, build user-friendly products, and attract customers that banks have often struggled to serve with the same speed. Meanwhile, banks bring regulatory trust, balance sheets, and established distribution networks. As a result, both sides have increasingly tried to build across the full financial stack, even though neither has consistently done everything well.

The person paying the price for that competitive framing is the Nigerian business owner sitting in the middle of it. However, a finance director at a mid-sized Lagos manufacturing company is not choosing sides in the fintech versus banking debate. Instead, she is trying to pay 200 vendors without logging into five bank portals, collect payments from distributors without manually matching every bank transfer, generate NRS-compliant invoices without a separate tool, and close the books at month-end without three days of reconciliation.

In practice, she may use her bank for her primary account, a fintech for cross-border payments, another tool for expense approvals, and a spreadsheet to hold everything together. As a result, the infrastructure exists in pieces, but nobody has connected it into a complete experience for her.

That is the problem the bank-as-distribution, fintech-as-infrastructure model solves. Not for banks. Not for fintechs. For her.  

The African embedded finance market is valued at USD 13.2 billion in 2026 and is projected to reach USD 18 billion by 2030. The competitive landscape remains fragmented, with telcos, fintechs, banks, and B2B enablers all vying for control of distribution layers. That fragmentation is not a market failure. It is an opportunity for the organisations that recognise what each player does best and build partnerships accordingly. 

What Banks Do Best and Where They Stop

Nigerian and African banks are extraordinarily good at certain things. They hold regulatory trust built over decades. Their physical and digital distribution networks reach millions of business customers. At the same time, these institutions manage liquidity, compliance, and core banking infrastructure at a scale no fintech has yet replicated. For a business choosing where to hold its primary account, make its payroll run, and maintain its banking relationship, a licensed commercial bank is and will remain the natural answer.

What banks are less well equipped to do is build the software layer that sits on top of those core capabilities. The expense management workflows. The approval and spend control infrastructure. The NRS-compliant e-invoicing system. The bulk payment engine that pays 500 vendors in a single run. The reconciliation automation that closes the books in hours rather than days.

The alternative to the partnership model is every bank trying to build its own financial operations stack from scratch. Some have tried. The results have been slow to market, expensive to maintain, and consistently behind what purpose-built fintech platforms deliver. The banks that have recognised this most clearly are the ones moving fastest toward partnership rather than internal build.

The business spending management software market is projected to reach USD 26.68 billion in 2026, with the Middle East and Africa accounting for a growing share of that market. The opportunity is real and accelerating. The question is who builds the software layer and how it reaches the businesses that need it.

The Partnership Model: Banks as Distribution, Fintechs as Infrastructure

The model that Yele articulated at The Borderless Experience is not novel in global financial services. It has driven embedded finance growth across North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia over the last five years. What is novel is applying it seriously and at scale to the African B2B context.

The argument is straightforward. A bank like Wema Bank has hundreds of thousands of business customers using ALAT, its digital banking platform. Many of those businesses need more than a bank account. They need payment collections, vendor payment automation, expense management, NRS e-invoicing, and reconciliation. Building every one of those capabilities in-house would take years and require the bank to become a software product company alongside everything else it does.

Alternatively, the bank partners with a fintech that has already built those capabilities, already holds the relevant regulatory credentials, and already serves mid-market and enterprise businesses in the same market. The bank becomes the distribution layer. The fintech provides the B2B payment infrastructure. The business customer gets a complete financial operating experience within the banking relationship they already have.

As Yele put it at The Borderless Experience: “Banks can become the distribution layer. Duplo provides the B2B payment infrastructure. It is a model that gives banks a faster path to innovation while giving businesses better ways to collect, move, and manage money.”

This is precisely what the Duplo and Wema Bank partnership delivers. ALAT by Wema Bank business customers now have access to Duplo’s financial operating system, connecting payments, expense management, invoicing, and reconciliation directly to the bank they already trust. Wema Bank did not have to build those capabilities from scratch. Duplo did not have to build a banking licence and a branch network. Each brings what it does best. The business customer, the finance director still reconciling manually at month-end, gets the complete experience neither could have built alone.

Why This Model Will Define African Business Finance Over the Next Decade

The Wema Bank partnership is one expression of a model that Duplo intends to replicate. More broadly, the logic extends beyond any single institution. Every Nigerian commercial bank serves business customers who manage financial operations across disconnected tools. Therefore, each of those customers represents an opportunity for the bank to deepen its relationship by offering a more complete financial experience.

The banks that move first on this model can create a meaningful advantage. Business customers who manage payments, expenses, invoicing, and reconciliation within their banking platform are significantly more sticky than those who use their bank for core accounts while running financial operations elsewhere. As a result, the relationship deepens and switching costs increase. Ultimately, the bank becomes a financial operations partner rather than simply an account provider.

Meanwhile, Africa’s increasing openness to bank and fintech partnerships, growing adoption of open banking frameworks and APIs, and strong support from governments seeking to expand financial inclusion are accelerating the conditions for this model to thrive. Taken together, these developments point towards a more connected financial ecosystem. The question for each institution, therefore, is how quickly it chooses to move.

For fintechs on the other side of this equation, however, the model requires capabilities that not every company can deliver: genuine product depth, regulatory credibility, and the operational maturity to serve enterprise customers at scale within a regulated banking environment. These capabilities cannot be manufactured quickly. Instead, they develop over years of serving real businesses, managing real compliance obligations, and earning the trust of customers whose financial operations depend on the platform working reliably every day.

How Duplo Is Building the B2B Payment Infrastructure Layer

Duplo is CBN-licensed, NRS SI and APP licensed, PCI DSS certified, ISO certified, and NDPC-registered. More importantly, Duplo built the platform around the financial needs of mid-market and enterprise businesses across Africa. It brings business payments, expense management, NRS-compliant e-invoicing, bulk payouts, cross-border payments, and auto-reconciliation into one connected platform.

The bank-as-distribution, fintech-as-infrastructure model is not theoretical for Duplo. It is live, it is working, and it is the model we are building on. The Wema Bank partnership is the first expression of that model. For banks that serve mid-market and enterprise businesses and want to deepen those relationships through better financial operations tooling, the conversation starts at tryduplo.com.

As Yele said at The Borderless Experience: “The future of B2B finance will not be built by one player. It will be built through collaboration.”

The Path Forward

The future of African business banking will not be built by any single institution doing everything alone. Instead, it will emerge through partnerships that combine the regulatory trust and distribution of established banks with the product depth and operational agility of fintech companies that have spent years solving specific, complex problems for demanding customers.

The Borderless Experience by Condia brought together many of the people already thinking about this shift. The conversations happening there reflect broader questions about what African business finance could look like over the next five years. More importantly, they point to a model where banks and fintechs bring different strengths to the same financial ecosystem.

Banks as distribution. Fintechs as infrastructure.

For banks looking to expand what they can offer their business customers, the infrastructure exists and the partnership model is already taking shape. For businesses still managing financial operations across disconnected tools, a more connected experience is already available.

The next step starts with a conversation. Start here!

Frequently Asked Questions

How are banks and fintechs collaborating in Africa?
The most effective model emerging across African financial services is banks partnering with fintechs to offer capabilities they have not built themselves. The bank provides the regulatory trust, the distribution network, and the core banking infrastructure. The fintech provides the software layer: payment automation, expense management, invoicing, and reconciliation. Business customers get a complete financial experience within the banking relationship they already have.

What is embedded finance in Africa?
Embedded finance in Africa refers to the integration of financial services directly into non-financial platforms and banking environments. The African embedded finance market is valued at USD 13.2 billion in 2026 and is projected to reach USD 18 billion by 2030. In the B2B context, this means business customers can access payment operations, expense management, and invoicing tools directly within their banking platform rather than using separate standalone tools.

What is the future of B2B banking in Nigeria?
The future of B2B banking in Nigeria is partnership-driven. As a result, banks that serve mid-market and enterprise businesses will increasingly offer financial operations capabilities through partnerships with fintech companies that have built these tools specifically for the Nigerian business context. The Duplo and Wema Bank partnership is an early and concrete expression of this direction.

How does the Duplo and Wema Bank partnership work?
Wema Bank’s ALAT business customers have direct access to Duplo’s financial operating system through the ALAT platform. Businesses can automate payments, manage expenses and approvals, generate NRS-compliant invoices, collect payments, and reconcile automatically, all connected to the banking infrastructure they already use. Wema Bank provides the distribution and the banking relationship. Duplo provides the B2B financial operations platform.

Can other African banks partner with Duplo?
Yes. The Wema Bank partnership is the first expression of a model Duplo intends to replicate with other banks serving mid-market and enterprise business customers across Nigeria and Africa. Banks interested in offering modern financial operations capabilities to their business customers can start the conversation at tryduplo.com.