Paystack

Paystack turned ten in January 2026, and it marked the anniversary by restructuring rather than simply celebrating. Shola Akinlade, the company's co-founder and chief executive, announced the creation of The Stack Group, a new holding company that now sits above Paystack's original payments business, its consumer money-transfer app Zap, a newly acquired microfinance bank, and an in-house venture studio working on AI and stablecoins.

That restructuring followed a decade of steady expansion. Paystack says its payment volume has grown more than twelvefold since Stripe's 2020 acquisition, and it now serves more than 300,000 businesses across Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa and Côte d'Ivoire. The company reported reaching group-level profitability for the first time in early 2025 and has stayed profitable in most months since.

The clearest sign of that experimentation came just before the restructuring was announced, when Paystack acquired Ladder Microfinance Bank in January 2026 and relaunched it as Paystack Microfinance Bank, starting with lending to businesses before expanding into consumer credit and banking-as-a-service products for other fintechs.

What began in 2015 as a simple tool for Nigerian merchants to accept card payments is now the payments arm of a multi-brand group betting on banking, consumer money transfer and emerging technology as its next lines of growth, all while remaining, for now, a wholly Stripe-linked operation rather than an independent company chasing its own IPO.