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Africa’s fintech giants are already regional, but regulation isn’t When Nigerian fintech companies expand across Africa, the technology often travels easily. Payments APIs integrate quickly, merchants understand the products, customers adopt digital wallets and online checkout tools without much friction. Regulation, however, does not travel as easily. A fintech that is licensed in Nigeria must often repeat the entire licensing process when entering another African market, navigating new capital requirements, compliance rules, reporting standards, and supervisory expectations. The result is a fragmented regulatory landscape that many fintech founders say slows expansion across the continent. This challenge sits at the centre of the Central Bank of Nigeria’s Fintech Policy Insight Report, which explores the potential role of regulatory passporting in reducing duplication across jurisdictions. According to the CBN survey, 62.5% of fintech stakeholders already operate in or plan to expand into other African markets, and the same share supports the development of a regulatory passporting framework. The message from the ecosystem is clear: African fintech companies want to scale regionally. The question is whether the regulatory architecture of the continent is ready. Infrastructure matters as much as regulation Nigeria hosts one of Africa’s largest fintech ecosystems. Startups such as Flutterwave, Paystack, and Fincra now power payment infrastructure, merchant acquiring tools, cross-border settlement networks, and financial APIs used by businesses across multiple African markets. Yet each new market often introduces a different regulatory environment. Fintech operators expanding regionally must secure local licences, meet jurisdiction-specific capital requirements, and build relationships with local banking partners and regulators. These processes can take months and sometimes years. Passporting, Fincra argues, would also fundamentally reshape partnership models: by shifting relationships away from local intermediaries engaged purely for regulatory access toward partners focused on payment system connectivity, liquidity management, and settlement efficiency. But reducing licensing duplication, while necessary, may not be sufficient. Even operators who have cleared the regulatory hurdle find that the practical mechanics of cross-border payments introduce a separate layer of complexity. Expansion ambitions meet regulatory fragmentation Even when regulatory approval is secured, fintech companies must still navigate the practical mechanics of cross-border payments. These include foreign exchange constraints, liquidity management, settlement timing, and interoperability between payment systems. Nigeria’s domestic payments system offers an example of what coordinated infrastructure can achieve. The country’s instant payments network processed nearly 11 billion transactions in 2024, according to the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS). Nigeria’s scale is significant in global terms and has shown how large domestic payment rails can become foundational infrastructure for digital financial ecosystems. Yet, scaling such systems across borders introduces new coordination challenges: from fraud monitoring and dispute resolution to identity verification and settlement oversight. Transaction volume alone, however, does not define interoperability. In Paystack’s assessment, the gap between infrastructure progress and commercial reliability is where the most consequential work remains, particularly around data sharing, identity verification, and what merchants actually experience at the point of settlement. Passporting may start with bilateral corridors While passporting is often discussed as a continent-wide framework, the CBN report suggests that implementation may begin with smaller regulatory pilots. Survey participants proposed exploring bilateral cooperation between Nigeria and several peer regulators, including those in Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, Uganda, and Senegal. Such pilots could test mutual recognition of licences while regulators coordinate supervisory standards and consumer protection frameworks. They could also allow countries to experiment with payments system interoperability, particularly between markets with strong digital financial ecosystems. One example mentioned in the report is the possibility of testing interoperability between Nigeria’s and Ghana’s payments systems to support real-time cross-border settlement. These experiments could complement continental infrastructure initiatives such as the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), which aims to enable instant cross-border payments in local currencies across participating African markets. For operators who have navigated Africa’s licensing landscape firsthand, passporting is less a destination than a foundation. Flutterwave, which has expanded across multiple African markets without a passporting framework in place, sees the bilateral corridor model as the right sequencing. How passporting works in other financial markets The idea of regulatory passporting is not unique to Africa. In the European Union, financial institutions licensed in one member state can operate across the bloc under passporting frameworks embedded in regulations such as MiFID II. This system allows banks, investment firms, and fintech companies to provide services across 27 EU countries without having to secure a licence in every country. The European Union’s Undertakings for Collective Investment in Transferable Securities (UCITS) framework, for example, allows investment funds authorized in one member state to be marketed across the entire bloc, while Singapore’s Monetary Authority has pursued cross-border regulatory cooperation agreements to support fintech innovation. These precedents matter for Africa, but they do not translate directly. The EU’s passporting architecture was built on decades of regulatory convergence across economies with comparable institutional maturity. African regulators are now exploring whether similar coordination models can work across a continent with far more diverse regulatory environments, deeper infrastructure gaps, and a much shorter history of cross-border supervisory cooperation. The operators and investors who have engaged most closely with this question are clear that the concept is sound, but that the conditions which made it work elsewhere will need to be deliberately constructed here, not assumed. Why regulatory alignment matters for Fintech capital Beyond operators and regulators, passporting also matters for capital. African fintech startups attracted $1.38 billion in venture investment in 2025 alone, yet investors continue to weigh regulatory complexity when assessing cross-border expansion strategies. Growth investors often evaluate markets not only on demand and revenue potential, but also on regulatory predictability and the cost of expansion. However, regulatory alignment alone does not determine fintech success.Market depth, customer adoption, and strong product execution remain decisive factors. In that sense, passporting may reduce friction in scaling across markets, but it does not replace the fundamentals that ultimately drive company performance. As Lexi Novitske, partner at Norrsken22, noted in response to the CBN report, the practical implementation of new regulatory frameworks will matter as much as the concept
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On the 10th floor of ABC Place in Nairobi’s Westlands, Radhika Bhachu doesn’t offer you tea. No small ceremony to ease you in. She’s already mid-thought when you sit down, like you’ve walked into a conversation she’s been having with herself all morning. If we weren’t doing this interview, she says, she’d be on investor calls. Properly in it. Updating her pipeline, responding to questions, and nudging conversations forward. In between, she’d be with her team—sales, marketing, client service—trying to get a feel of things on the ground. Are customers complaining? What’s slowing them down? Where can AI help? Then maybe coffee, but not the relaxed kind. The kind where you’re still half-working, just without your laptop open. She speaks quickly, but not nervously. There’s a rhythm to it. Before this, she was at BlackRock for five years as a relationship manager, helping investors build wealth quietly, predictably, over time. There are systems, structures and a lot of long-term thinking. Then she came back to Kenya in 2020 and found something else: people saving, hustling, building, but not quite investing in the way she had seen elsewhere. Now she’s trying to build that bridge through Ndovu, a Nairobi-based wealth management startup. Lately, what’s been sitting with her is a tension she doesn’t try to dress up. Last year, the company found that most of its revenue was coming from a small group of customers. The obvious move was to lean into that, middle income and above, the ones already closest to investing. It makes sense. It’s business. But that’s not why she started. “The vision is still everyone,” she says. “But you can’t do everything at once.” She pauses, briefly, then shrugs it off. “It’s just sequencing.” I spoke to Radhika about the path the BlackRock alumni took from the corridors of global finance to the messy, unpredictable business of getting Africans to invest. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. If we weren’t doing this interview, what would a perfect afternoon look like for you? Right now, I’m fundraising, so a perfect afternoon would involve investor calls, updating my investor pipeline, and responding to questions. I also oversee the distribution team, so I’d be working with sales, marketing, and client service to understand how business is going—are we getting customer complaints? How can we use AI to streamline tasks? So, really, thinking about distribution strategy and fundraising. It would probably end with coffee with a client or an investor. What’s been occupying your mind lately, something you keep coming back to? Last year, we realised that, like many businesses, 80% of our revenue comes from 20% of our clients. Our vision is that in a decade, every African will be a capital market investor. But the reality is that as an African startup, there’s not enough funding to go after the entire value chain—middle income, high net worth, and low income all require significant resources. Last year, we had to make a difficult decision: with our current funding and team, we needed to focus on the low-hanging fruit, middle-income and above. But as a founder, I started this to help everyone participate in wealth creation. We’ve partnered with banks and telcos to embed our solutions, but it’s disappointing that as a chief executive office (CEO), the right business decision is to move toward momentum—because that helps us grow revenue faster, increase our cash, and eventually serve smaller holders. It’s just sequencing. But it weighs on me. That, and cybersecurity. Radhika and a section of her staff. Image source: Ndovu You grew up between cultures. How did that shape your earliest understanding of money, security, and ambition? I’m a Kenyan-Indian, and that’s been amazing. Kenyan culture is very kind and community-led; people help each other. Indian culture thinks more about the future: you build wealth not just for this generation, but for your children’s children. What I think our culture could do better is talk about money at the dinner table. We didn’t, but we knew our parents had a business. They’d say, “Go have coffee with someone, see what they do, talk to that uncle at a party.” That helped you figure out what to study. But no one teaches you what to do once you have money. We’re launching a custodial product for children—parents manage it, but kids can research and see how their investments perform. That teaches budgeting, decision-making, and opportunity cost. Unfortunately, that’s taking a lower priority right now due to capital constraints. Was there a defining moment growing up when you realised money, or the lack of it, shapes how people move through the world? An unfortunate lesson about the world is that if you have money, you matter to somebody; if you have no money, you matter to nobody. And that’s just a really sad reality of the world. And I think growing up, not so much, but now, living in a social media age, it’s so apparent. For me, it was when I was younger. I lost my mom, and so my dad sent me to school, and I started doing the paper round (delivering newspapers). I was in Canada, and we used to do the paper round to make money. I’m very fortunate; everything was painful, but we started learning that to make money, you have to work really hard. And there’s a saying in our culture, actually: making money is the easy part, but keeping it, you know? Doing the paper round, then actually getting a job at 16; that’s when I was like, “wow, okay, making money is really hard.” That’s why, when you have money, there is some childhood stuff that kind of links back to saying I have to be successful because I want to be able to give my family everything they need. And you have to make sure that you’re working hard for money. And now it’s changed into: how can you be more valuable, and how can you create money not the
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Table of contents Why was the deadline moved to April 14? What counts as “income” under the Nigeria Tax Act 2025? Who needs to file taxes in Lagos? What you need before you start filing on the LIRS eTax portal How to file taxes on the LIRS eTax portal: Step by step Penalties for not filing your tax return by April 14 What happens after you file? Getting your Tax Clearance Certificate Frequently asked questions about filing taxes on the LIRS eTax portal What Nigeria’s 2025 tax reform changed If you have been trying to figure out how to file taxes in Lagos, this guide covers everything you need. The Lagos State Internal Revenue Service (LIRS) eTax portal at etax.lirs.net is the only approved platform for filing your annual personal income tax return, with a deadline of April 14, 2026. Every Lagos resident earning income must file, including salaried employees. Even if your company deducts PAYE from your salary every month and remits it to the government, you are still legally required to file your own individual return. Your employer’s payment does not cover your filing obligation. This is the first filing season under Nigeria’s sweeping 2025 tax reform laws, which introduced new tax bands, abolished the old Consolidated Relief Allowance, and made electronic filing the only acceptable method. Below is everything you need to know, from required documents and step-by-step portal navigation to exact penalty figures and post-filing steps. Why was the deadline moved to April 14? On March 31, 2026, LIRS Executive Chairman, Dr Ayodele Subair, announced a two-week extension of the individual annual income tax return deadline, pushing it from the statutory March 31 to April 14, 2026. The press statement, signed by Head of Corporate Communications, Monsurat Amasa-Oyelude, described it as a one-off measure to ease compliance and give taxpayers additional time to complete and submit accurate tax returns. The official statement did not mention portal problems. But Technext broke a story on March 30: the LIRS eTax portal at etax.lirs.net had experienced widespread technical difficulties just one day before the original deadline. Users reported hours of failed access attempts, submission errors, and an inability to complete filings. One user noted: “This is what’s expected of a platform likely designed for a few thousand users per day, suddenly needed to be accessed by millions.” Since manual filing has been completely phased out, taxpayers had no alternative. This was not an isolated event. Earlier in 2026, LIRS also extended the employer annual returns deadline from February 1 to February 7, signalling a pattern of administrative flexibility under the new tax regime. LIRS described the extension as a one-off measure. After April 14, penalties under the Nigeria Tax Administration Act (NTAA) 2025 kick in: N100,000 for the first month of default, plus N50,000 for each subsequent month. What counts as “income” under the Nigeria Tax Act 2025? The NTA 2025 defines ‘income’ broadly. Section 4 of the Act spells out every category of income, profits, or gains that are chargeable to tax. The law does not limit income to your salary or your business profit. It captures almost every way money can come to you. Here is what counts as taxable income: Employment income — your salary, wages, fees, allowances, bonuses, commissions, gratuity, and any other benefit your employer gives you, including things like a company car or rent-free accommodation Business and trade income — profit from any trade, business, or commercial activity. This includes selling perfume from home, baking and selling food, running a logistics operation from your phone, or any buying-and-selling activity, no matter how small Professional income — fees earned from professional services. This applies to lawyers, doctors, consultants, photographers, makeup artists, event planners, and any person who earns money by rendering a service Investment income — interest from savings accounts, dividends from shares, rent collected from property you own, and royalties Digital and virtual asset gains — profit from buying and selling crypto, NFTs, or any other digital asset Other sources — prizes, winnings, honoraria, grants, awards, discounts, rebates, and income from selling personal property or fixed assets The threshold is N800,000 per year. If your total income from all the sources above is N800,000 or less annually, your tax is 0%. But you are still required to file a return. Who needs to file taxes in Lagos? One of the biggest misconceptions in Nigerian tax compliance is the belief that salaried employees whose employers deduct Pay-As-You-Earn (PAYE) tax do not need to file annual returns. This is wrong. Section 14(3) of the NTAA 2025 explicitly resolves a long-standing ambiguity in the old Personal Income Tax Act: employees must file their own annual returns of income from all sources, notwithstanding the employer’s separate filing obligation under Section 14(1)-(2). LIRS has stated this directly: “Filing annual tax returns is not optional; it is a legal requirement under the NTAA 2025. While many employees believe their tax obligations end with PAYE deductions by employers, the LIRS clarifies that individuals must still file returns.” Taiwo Oyedele, Minister of State for Finance and Chairman of the Presidential Fiscal Policy and Tax Reforms Committee, reinforced the point, noting that “the tax reforms clarify that employees cannot assume their obligations end once employers deduct taxes from their salaries.” Here are the categories of people legally required to file taxes in Lagos, under Section 13 of the NTAA 2025: Salaried/PAYE employees – Even if your employer already files PAYE returns and deducts tax monthly, you must file an individual annual return declaring all income sources. This includes your salary, any side businesses, freelance work, rental income, and dividends. Self-employed individuals, freelancers, and gig workers – This includes digital creators, consultants, and anyone earning from online platforms. The NTA 2025 expressly brings digital/virtual asset gains, prizes, honoraria, and nontraditional income into the tax net. Business owners – Sole proprietors file as individuals under personal income tax. Partnerships are addressed under Section 15 of the NTA 2025. Professionals – Lawyers, doctors, accountants,
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