Onafriq’s rapid expansion across Africa is facing a familiar challenge for the continent’s fintech industry: growing transaction networks while currency instability puts pressure on the dollar value of the business.

The fintech’s revenue fell 7% year-on-year to $79 million in 2024, down from $85.6 million in 2023, with the company attributing much of the pressure to the depreciation of the Nigerian naira.

The decline came after several years of strong growth. Onafriq increased revenue from just $7.9 million in 2020 to $85.6 million in 2023, reflecting the rapid expansion of digital payments, remittances and cross-border transactions across its markets.

But the naira’s sharp depreciation in 2023 changed the picture in 2024.

Currency depreciation hits transaction volumes

Onafriq’s total processed volume, or TPV, declined from $11.2 billion in 2023 to $8 billion in 2024, representing a 28% year-on-year drop.

TPV measures the total value of transactions processed through the company’s payment infrastructure and is an important indicator of the scale of activity moving through its network.

The decline does not necessarily mean that Africans suddenly stopped using digital payments.

For a company operating across multiple currencies, however, the dollar value of transactions can fall significantly when local currencies lose value against the US dollar.

That makes currency depreciation particularly important for African fintechs that report their financial performance in dollars.

Onafriq's experience therefore highlights a broader challenge facing companies building pan-African financial infrastructure: transaction growth in local currencies does not always translate into equivalent growth when revenues and volumes are converted into dollars.

Gross profit falls, but costs also come down

The pressure on revenue also affected Onafriq’s gross profit.

Gross profit declined 3% to approximately $42 million during the year.

However, the company managed to reduce its cost of sales by 11% to $38 million, providing some relief as revenue weakened.

That suggests Onafriq was able to achieve some improvement in the cost structure of its operations even as the top line came under pressure.

The bigger problem remained operating expenses and the cost of maintaining a rapidly expanding payments infrastructure.

Losses from operating activities increased to $29 million in 2024, compared with $23 million a year earlier.

Losses remain despite growing network

Onafriq has yet to turn its rapid expansion into sustained profitability.

The company recorded a $36.2 million loss after tax in 2024. While that remains substantial, it represents an improvement from the roughly $40 million loss recorded in 2023.

The difference between the operating loss and the loss after tax also shows that the company's financial position cannot be judged by revenue alone.

Onafriq is simultaneously dealing with the costs of building and maintaining a large payment network, currency movements, financing requirements and the challenge of generating sufficient margins from payment activity.

For investors, the question is increasingly whether the company's growing infrastructure can eventually produce enough operating leverage to move the business into profitability.

One billion wallets connected

Despite the financial pressure, Onafriq's underlying network continued to expand significantly.

The company reported that more than 500 million wallets were connected through its infrastructure in 2023.

By 2025, that figure had increased to more than one billion wallets.

That milestone is significant because it demonstrates the scale Onafriq has achieved as a payments infrastructure provider.

Rather than operating solely as a consumer-facing fintech, the company has built infrastructure designed to connect financial institutions, mobile money platforms, payment providers and other participants across African markets.

The result is a network that can facilitate movement of money across fragmented financial systems.

However, the geographical expansion of the business has been considerably slower.

Onafriq added only one new market during the period, increasing its footprint from 37 to 38 countries.

That suggests the company's next phase may be less about simply entering new countries and more about extracting greater value from the network it has already built.

Debt falls sharply

There was also a positive development on Onafriq's balance sheet.

Total borrowings fell from $39 million in 2023 to $23 million at the end of 2024.

Reducing debt gives the company more room to manage its finances at a time when its revenue is being affected by currency volatility.

Onafriq also received $47 million from a Series C Extension III funding round agreed during the previous financial year, helping strengthen its liquidity position.

The combination of lower borrowings and additional funding provides some financial breathing room as the company continues investing in its payments network.

But liquidity remains a concern

Despite those improvements, Onafriq's cash position weakened during the year.

Cash and cash equivalents declined from approximately $71.9 million to $48.2 million.

At the same time, accumulated losses widened to $176.5 million.

That combination is important because payments businesses require significant liquidity to maintain operations, settle transactions and continue investing in infrastructure.

Onafriq's ability to sustain its network therefore depends not only on transaction growth but also on maintaining enough cash and financing capacity to support the business.

That concern was explicitly highlighted by its auditors.

Auditors flag going-concern uncertainty

In its audit report, Grant Thornton highlighted a material uncertainty related to Onafriq's ability to continue as a going concern.

The warning does not mean that the company is shutting down or that failure is inevitable.

Rather, it indicates that there is significant uncertainty over whether the company will be able to maintain sufficient liquidity and generate the necessary financial performance to sustain its operations.

For Onafriq, that challenge is particularly important because its business strategy depends on scale.

The more countries, financial institutions and wallets connected to its infrastructure, the greater the potential transaction opportunity. But building that network also requires substantial investment before the company can fully capture the economic benefits.

The bigger African fintech problem

Onafriq's financial performance illustrates one of the difficult realities of building a pan-African fintech.

Africa presents a huge opportunity for digital payments because its financial systems remain fragmented across countries, currencies, banks and mobile-money networks.

Connecting those systems can create enormous economic value.

But operating across those markets also exposes fintech companies to currency depreciation, regulatory differences, varying payment infrastructures and different levels of consumer purchasing power.

The naira's depreciation is a particularly clear example.

A transaction that is worth a certain amount in local currency can represent substantially less in US dollar terms after a major currency devaluation. For a company reporting its results in dollars, that can make revenue and transaction volumes appear significantly weaker even when the underlying payment activity remains important.

This means African fintechs have to solve two problems simultaneously: building scale and building resilience.

Scale is no longer enough

Onafriq's numbers show that it has achieved considerable scale.

More than one billion connected wallets demonstrate the reach of its infrastructure, while operations across 38 countries position the company among the more geographically extensive payment networks serving Africa.

But scale alone does not guarantee profitability.

The company's 2024 results show the tension clearly: its network is becoming larger while revenue declined, operating losses increased and cash reserves fell.

At the same time, debt has decreased, cost of sales have improved and the net loss narrowed.

The picture is therefore mixed rather than simply negative.

Onafriq now needs to demonstrate that its enormous network can translate into stronger margins, recurring revenue and eventually sustainable profitability.

The most important part of Onafriq's results may not be the 7% revenue decline.

It is the gap between network scale and financial sustainability.

Connecting one billion wallets is an impressive infrastructure milestone, but the real test for Onafriq will be whether those connections generate enough profitable payment activity to justify the cost of maintaining the network.

The company's experience also offers a warning for the broader African fintech sector: a fintech can grow rapidly in users, countries and transaction volume and still remain financially vulnerable if currency movements, operating costs and liquidity are not managed carefully.

As African payments become increasingly interconnected, the next phase of competition may therefore be less about who can build the biggest network and more about who can turn that network into a durable, profitable business.