Turkey's Payments Expertise and Africa's Fintech Frontier: A Structural Fit That Has Not Yet Materialised

There is a pattern in global fintech that rarely gets discussed explicitly: the companies best equipped to build payments infrastructure in difficult markets are often those forged in difficult markets themselves. India's UPI ecosystem was designed by engineers who understood why 300 million people still paid for everything in cash. M-Pesa was built by people who knew that most Kenyans would never set foot in a bank branch. The principle is straightforward. The operators who have spent years solving for unreliable connectivity, volatile currencies, and unpredictable regulators tend to export those solutions more effectively than operators from stable, well-banked economies. By this logic, Turkey's payments industry should be a natural supplier of expertise to Africa's fast-growing fintech markets. The structural parallels are striking. The actual commercial connections, as of mid-2021, are almost nonexistent.

Start with what Turkey's fintech sector has learned the hard way. The Turkish lira lost roughly 50 percent of its value against the US dollar between 2018 and 2021, a depreciation that forced every payments company operating in the country to build systems capable of handling rapid currency swings, real-time exchange rate adjustments, and the settlement risk that accompanies a volatile monetary environment. Turkish payment processors also operate under a regulatory framework that has changed substantially and repeatedly over the past decade. The Banking Regulation and Supervision Agency (BDDK) and the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey (TCMB) have introduced new licensing categories, altered capital requirements, and, in several notable cases, revoked licences entirely. The result is a domestic industry populated by companies that have learned to be operationally flexible in ways that their counterparts in, say, the Netherlands or Singapore have never needed to be. Turkish payment firms process transactions across a fragmented banking system, manage integrations with multiple mobile operators, and navigate a compliance environment where the rules can shift between quarters. These are not glamorous competencies. They are, however, precisely the competencies required to operate in sub-Saharan Africa.

Africa's payments landscape, by the numbers, is enormous and underserved. The continent's population exceeded 1.3 billion in 2021, with a median age of approximately 19. Mobile money accounts across Africa surpassed 500 million registered users by the end of 2020, according to the GSMA. Nigeria alone had over 80 million adults with limited or no access to formal banking services. The opportunity is not theoretical. Flutterwave, the Nigerian payments company, raised a $170 million Series C in March 2021 at a valuation exceeding $1 billion. Paystack, also Nigerian, was acquired by Stripe in October 2020 for a reported $200 million. Kenya's M-Pesa, operated by Safaricom, has become one of the most studied fintech products in the world. Capital has noticed: African tech startups raised over $1.4 billion in venture funding in 2020, according to Partech Africa's annual report, with payments accounting for the largest share. The market is real, the money is flowing in, and the infrastructure gaps remain vast.

The question, then, is why Turkish fintech companies have not moved into African markets in any meaningful way. Several factors offer partial explanations. The first is simply that Turkey's own domestic market, despite its difficulties, has been absorbing most of the available entrepreneurial energy. Turkish electronic payments volumes have grown rapidly; the Interbank Card Center (BKM) reported that credit and debit card transaction volumes in Turkey exceeded 2.2 trillion lira in 2020. Building and maintaining market share at home, particularly under tightening regulation, leaves little bandwidth for international expansion. The second factor is capital. Turkish fintechs are, by and large, not flush with the kind of venture funding that enables speculative international expansion. Total venture capital invested in Turkish startups across all sectors has historically been a fraction of what a single well-funded African fintech competitor might raise in a single round. Expanding into a new continent requires regulatory expertise, local hires, partnership development, and patient capital; resources that most Turkish payment companies simply do not have.

There is also a diplomatic and commercial infrastructure gap. China's fintech expansion into Africa has been supported by extensive state-backed lending, Belt and Road Initiative relationships, and deep telecommunications partnerships (Huawei's network infrastructure is ubiquitous across the continent). India's fintech presence in East Africa leverages a diaspora that numbers in the millions, with established business networks in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. Turkey has been building diplomatic ties across Africa over the past two decades, with Turkish Airlines now serving over 40 African destinations, and bilateral trade has grown. But the commercial infrastructure specifically relevant to fintech, meaning banking correspondent relationships, regulatory mutual recognition frameworks, and established technology partnerships, remains thin. A Turkish payments company looking to obtain a licence in Nigeria or Kenya would be starting largely from scratch, without the institutional scaffolding that Chinese or Indian competitors can lean on.

None of this means the opportunity is illusory. The structural fit between Turkish payments expertise and African market conditions is genuine. Both environments demand systems that can handle multi-currency complexity. Both require technology stacks that degrade gracefully when connectivity is intermittent. Both involve regulatory environments where adaptability matters more than scale. The Turkish fintech sector has, through the pressures of its domestic market, developed exactly the kind of operational resilience that African payments infrastructure demands. If Turkey's regulatory tightening continues to push entrepreneurial talent outward, and if the capital environment for Turkish startups improves (both plausible trajectories), Africa is a logical destination. The demographics are compelling, the competitive landscape, while growing, is far from settled, and the technical challenges are ones that Turkish operators are unusually well-prepared to address.

What is missing, as of mid-2021, is the catalyst. No major Turkish fintech has announced an African expansion. No significant Turkish venture fund has publicly committed to backing Africa-focused payments ventures. The Turkish government's fintech strategy documents, such as they exist, are focused almost entirely on the domestic market and, to a lesser extent, on positioning Istanbul as a regional hub for Central Asia and the Middle East. Africa, when it appears at all in Turkish financial policy discussions, is discussed in terms of construction contracts, defence exports, and humanitarian aid, not payments infrastructure. The gap between structural logic and commercial reality can persist for years, or it can close quickly when a single successful entrant demonstrates the model. For now, the logic sits on one side and the action sits on the other. It is worth watching whether that changes.