With over 100,000 users, 50 countries, and zero transfer fees, the Lagos-based platform is rewriting what financial access looks like for Africans everywhere

When Platnova launched in 2023, it entered one of the most competitive and unforgiving sectors in African technology. Three years on, the company is not only still standing, but it is also accelerating, and doing so in ways that challenge some of the assumptions about what African fintech can achieve.

The numbers are worth pausing on: over 100,000 verified users transacting across more than 50 countries, in 15 different currencies. For a company that is yet to complete its fourth year of operation, the scale of reach is notable. More significantly, however, is the quality of the infrastructure that has been built to sustain it.
Platnova operates with regulatory registrations and partnerships across five jurisdictions: Nigeria, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and Rwanda, a compliance footprint that most African startups do not achieve until far later in their growth cycle, if at all.

“The same problems our users face personally, slow settlements, currency friction, unreliable infrastructure, they face them ten times over when running a business. That is the problem we are now solving at scale.” – Benjamin Oyemolan, CEO, Platnova.

Its Vault product, which allows users to save in Dollars, Pounds, Euros, and Naira with a 15.5 per cent return on investment, has emerged as a particularly differentiated offering in a market where currency instability has made saving in foreign denominations a practical necessity rather than a luxury. The company’s USD Account, launched more recently, extends this logic further, allowing African users to receive, hold, and transact in United States Dollars without leaving the platform.

Perhaps the most pointed statement of intent came with Platnova’s decision to eliminate transfer fees on naira transactions, a move that its chief executive has framed not as a temporary promotion but as a philosophical position. In a country where the Central Bank of Nigeria’s data suggests Nigerians paid tens of billions of naira in routine transfer fees in 2023 alone, the significance of that stance should not be understated.

The company is now turning its attention to businesses, rolling out merchant API tools and payment infrastructure designed for Nigerian and African companies that operate across borders. It is a market with considerable headroom and considerable pain, and Platnova’s existing multi-currency architecture gives it a credible foundation from which to compete.

As it marks three years, the question for Platnova is no longer whether it can survive the early stage. It is whether the infrastructure it has built is strong enough to carry the ambition it has set for the next phase.