The Managing Director, Payment Processing & Switching, Interswitch Purepay, Akeem Lawal, has highlighted the critical role of collaboration between fintechs, commercial banks, infrastructure providers and regulators in building a financial ecosystem that can scale without compromising trust, compliance or resilience.

Lawal stated this while speaking at The Borderless Experience 2026 in Lagos on the future of African Fintech.

Also at the event, in a conversation with the CEO, Zest, Kemi Okusanya, and moderated by the Founder & Publisher, Condia, Benjamin Dada, he emphasised that fintechs cannot – and should not – be expected to solve the challenges of financial innovation alone.

“I don’t think the fintechs can solve it alone,” he noted, underscoring the need for commercial banks and infrastructure providers to create the compliant and transparent layers that enable Fintechs to focus on innovation.

“For Interswitch, this represents a fundamental principle of Africa’s digital financial evolution: innovation is only as powerful as the infrastructure that supports it,” he stated.

As Fintechs continue to transform how individuals and businesses access and move money, trusted infrastructure providers have a critical role to play in enabling secure, compliant and resilient financial ecosystems. The collaboration between innovators, established financial institutions, infrastructure providers and regulators will therefore be essential to ensuring that Africa’s Fintech revolution is not only rapid, but sustainable.

Lawal’s said his views reflect Interswitch’s broader thought leadership on the future of payments and financial infrastructure across Africa -advocating for an ecosystem where innovation and infrastructure advance together.

In terms of what comes next for cross-border and contactless payments, he opined that trust remains the larger obstacle, since customers tapping a card without entering a PIN often assume the transaction is less secure than it actually is.

He concluded by emphasizing that “The future of fintech is not simply about building revolutionary products. It is about building the infrastructure that allows that revolution to endure.”