Paymentology, the global issuer-processor whose technology powers card programmes for some of Africa's largest mobile money and fintech platforms, has raised $175 million in a funding round co-led by Apis Partners and Aspirity Partners. The investment, announced on 12 May 2026, is one of the largest ever injected into the payment infrastructure layer globally and signals growing institutional conviction that the back-end systems powering cards and digital payments represent one of the most compelling opportunities in financial services.

The round was led by Apis Partners, a private equity firm specialising in financial infrastructure with deep roots in emerging markets including Africa, and Aspirity Partners, a pan-European firm for which this investment marks the first deployment from its inaugural fund.

What Paymentology Does

Paymentology operates a cloud-native, highly configurable processing platform that enables financial institutions to issue, manage, and process card and digital payment programmes in real time across 68 countries. Its clients include M-Pesa by Safaricom, one of Africa's most widely used mobile money platforms, alongside fast-growing neobanks, digital asset card programmes, and embedded finance providers globally.

New sales rose 117% year-on-year in FY25 and transaction volumes increased 65%, reflecting strong demand from both digital-first challengers and established banks looking to replace ageing legacy infrastructure that limits their ability to deploy new products quickly or process transactions at the speed modern consumers expect.



Where the Capital Goes

The $175 million will fund Paymentology's continued global expansion and product development, with a specific focus on three high-growth adjacent areas: stablecoin and digital asset card programmes, tokenisation for mobile and digital wallets, and AI-driven analytics for fraud prevention and customer spending intelligence.

For Africa specifically, the investment matters because Paymentology's infrastructure quietly underpins several of the continent's most widely used payment products. When a Kenyan M-Pesa user makes a card transaction or a Nigerian neobank customer taps to pay, there is a processing layer making that happen. Paymentology is one of the companies operating that layer, and $175 million of fresh capital means more investment in the reliability, speed, and feature set of the infrastructure that African digital finance runs on.