Nigeria’s bank-owned fintech subsidiaries have been hunting for their breakout moment.
For Guaranty Trust Holding Company (GTCO)’s fintech arm, HabariPay, that moment came in H1 2025, where it grew its profit twelvefold to $2.70 million from $217,094 in H1 2022.
It’s almost the same way that Stanbic IBTC’s Zest grew its income fourteenfold to $587,128 in the first half of 2025. But Zest is still running at a loss (the fintech lost $261,525 in H1 2025), and Access Bank’s Hydrogen reported a profit of $190,268 in Q1 2025. This makes HabariPay Nigeria’s most profitable bank-backed fintech.
What’s the growth driver? The surge is powered by stronger merchant activity and transaction volumes. Habari earns revenue from net commissions on merchant transactions and sales margins on bill payments, such as airtime vending and bulk SMS. Add in GTCO’s switching licence that allows it to process transfers directly, and what you get is a business model that scales quickly and keeps more of the transaction economics in-house.
Still, Habari’s growth only accounts for 0.89% of its parent company’s H1 2025 profit, which stands at $301.88 million, and the gap is wider outside bank-backed fintechs.
Habari is still a lightweight beside fintech giants like OPay, Flutterwave, Paystack, PalmPay, and Moniepoint. Estimates peg PalmPay’s 2023 revenue at $63.9 million and Moniepoint’s at $264.5 million.
Zoom out: HabariPay has shown that bank-backed fintechs can compete and grow fast with the right products and licences. But can they keep pace with independent giants that already dominate Nigeria’s payments economy? Well, the race isn’t over.
