On September 24, 2024, as venture capital funding for African startups plummeted and anxiety around the decline grew, Abdulhamid Hassan, the founder of prominent open banking startup Mono, posted a simple tweet: “don’t give up. don’t die.”
It wasn’t just a quip but a philosophy that’s guided the rise of the five-year-old YC-backed company, whose Delaware-registered parent company is named Relentless Lab, and which powers seamless financial experiences for companies like Mastercard, Flutterwave, and Carbon. It’s the same philosophy that carried him from a small Ijebu town in southwest Nigeria to Lagos’ tech hub, then hubs in Egypt, Latvia, the UAE, and France, before returning him to Lagos, where he’s been at work building Mono.
“It feels like we have failed if I open a fintech app today and do not see Mono,” says Hassan. “I want a world where, if I open any fintech application in Nigeria today, there is one particular feature that Mono powers. If that doesn’t happen yet, I won’t sleep.”
More recently, Hassan’s sleepless ambition has led to Owo, a new product that lets anyone make a payment by sending a WhatsApp message. Yet to launch, Owo is seeing impressive traction already: Hassan claims that the product is processing ₦1 billion naira monthly.
“In five years, Owo will be the biggest way Nigerians spend money,” he says.
From Ijebu to the world
I spoke to Hassan from his hometown in Ijebu Ode, Ogun State, in western Nigeria. He arrived on the call three minutes early. As we exchanged pleasantries, I took another look at his LinkedIn profile. Mono, his five-year startup, is the only work experience listed there. “That’s because Mono is my life’s work,” he says. It was easy to forget that we were not conversing in person.
Hassan’s tech journey began in his hometown with parents who were not only entrepreneurial but also particular about service quality. His late father was a pioneer in Ijebu’s rental business, setting up tents and chairs for parties with an obsessive attention to detail, Hassan recalls. “He’d make us wash the chairs, the tents. If there was a single spot, you’d start over. No half measures.” His mother, a fashion designer, who he says brought modern flair to Ijebu’s 1990s fashion, was his first teacher on user experience, instilling in him just how a product’s design could evoke trust and desire. “I got my sense of what a good user experience looks like from her,” he says.
Those lessons shaped Abdul’s early forays into tech. After secondary school, he moved to Lagos to study computer engineering at the Nigerian Institute of Technology (NIT). The tech ecosystem was still a loose collection of forums and dreamers around the time, “not considered cool in Nigeria,” he recalls. Hassan found a home in Radar, ’s now-defunct popular forum for tech conversations, where he became a regular commentator. When Paystack launched in 2016, he was among those who first announced the news on the forum, a move that would later prove prophetic.
His first startup, Washify, launched in 2014. It was an ambitious attempt to be the “Uber for laundromats,” connecting users to nearby laundry services. Washify didn’t pan out, but it introduced Hassan to Shola Akinlade, Paystack’s co-founder. At the time, Akinlade was an engineer at Klein Devort, a software development and consulting company. Hassan says that Akinlade “really loved” the Washify app design and reached out to ask if he had time to collaborate on a project. Their conversation was brief and did not result in anything tangible—Hassan was preparing to move to Egypt for school—but it planted a seed.
The move to Egypt was a bureaucratic necessity. To study computer science in Latvia, where he’d won a spot, Abdul needed a visa, and Nigeria lacked a Latvian embassy. So, he spent a year in Cairo, doing freelance frontend work to make ends meet. “I was just waiting for the visa, doing nothing,” he says, laughing. Finally, in Latvia, he found the academic pace underwhelming. Already possessing founder experience, he was teaching his classmates more than he was learning. “It felt like a waste of money,” he admits. His brother was footing the bill, but Hassan, ever frugal, dropped out.
What followed was a brief nomadic stint. In the UAE, he joined the Flat6Labs Program with Skylar Labs, an AI startup for customer support that he launched with Cossi Achille Arouko, now co-founder of the finance management platform Bujeti. The company received accelerator support from Flat6 and later from the French Tech Ticket program, which provided €50,000 and a three-year residency in France.
Skylar Labs was eventually acquired, marking Hassan’s first successful exit—the acquisition price remains undisclosed. Hassan returned to Nigeria.
Back in Lagos, he launched OyaPay, a mobile app for offline payments via QR codes and Bluetooth. It was innovative but faltered due to disputes with an angel investor—his uncle, who’d backed him. “He’s a great person, but older investors think differently,” Hassan says. The failure stung, but Hassan reconnected with Akinlade. This time, their conversation led to a concrete offer: Hassan joined Paystack, bringing two key members of his OyaPay team with him.
There, he worked a lot on the merchant solutions and dashboards. And it was in the course of this job that the idea for what would later become Mono began to crystallise. Card payments were booming—Paystack processed over ₦10 billion in monthly transaction value for the first time in 2018 when he joined—but he felt restless. “I kept thinking, there’s more after card payments,” he says.
The accidental birth of Mono
In 2019, Abdul and his Mono co-founder, Prakhar Singh, were tinkering with a side project: an app to view all their bank balances in one place. “I just wanted to see my money,” he says. At the time, Nigeria’s open banking ecosystem was nonexistent, and competitors like Okra, a first mover, had APIs and documentation that proved frustrating to use sometimes. Frustrated, Hassan decided to build his own API, starting with GTBank.
A Medium post announcing the app’s launch in 2020 sparked unexpected interest, not in the app, but in its underlying API. Hassan says Carbon’s CEO, Chijioke Dozie, reached out asking for the API. But Hassan was sceptical. “I had ₦500,000 in my account. Okra had $1 million. I wasn’t going to compete,” he recalls. But Dozie insisted, and over a weekend, Hassan’s team cobbled together an API. Carbon tested it, loved its speed, and urged him to build a company. “That’s when I realised this was bigger than an app,” he says. Unprompted, a popular founder invested $100,000. “He didn’t know me personally but was impressed by my track record and the team’s speedy execution.”
Hassan says the company grew quickly through word of mouth. “Our documentation is so clear, even a non-developer can understand it,” he explains. Along the way, Carbon and Piggyvest, early customers, became investors.
Mono’s core offering is deceptively simple: APIs that let fintechs access bank statements, process direct debit payments, and verify identities. It’s the plumbing behind seamless onboarding, lending, and wallet funding for companies like Mastercard, Carbon, Piggyvest, and countless others.
The company got into Y Combinator with mounting investor confidence and has raised over $15 million. Hassan claims the company makes revenue that nearly covers its payroll for its staff of under 50. Mono has made no layoffs despite market turbulence and funding downturn, Hassan claims, adding that he avoids poaching staff for other companies and prefers to hire and train junior and mid-level talent and promotes internally. “Poaching doesn’t work,” he says. “Someone with more money will take them.” This preserves culture and context and has enabled Mono to move fast without burning cash. “We’re Ijebu people,” he jokes. “We know how to manage money.”
A world without friction, a Mono world
At its core, Mono is about removing friction. Before Mono, loan approvals in Nigeria could take weeks, requiring physical bank statements. Now, with Mono’s infrastructure, lenders can access real-time data, slashing approval time to minutes. “Someone told me they got a loan in an emergency because of us,” Hassan says, his voice lighting up. “That’s the impact I live for.”
Now he is trying to remove the friction in payments. Owo is Mono’s bold leap into the consumer market. A small team within his company has been working on the product which allows users to make payments on WhatsApp, which about 57 million Nigerians already have on their phones. “You haven’t seen any mobile application that has 60 million downloads. That is bigger than any channel,” Hassan exclaimed.
Launched quietly, it has already processed a staggering ₦1 billion in transactions pre-launch, Hassan says. Users can prompt transfers via texts, photos, and voice notes. It also has features like QR code scanning, automatic airtime top-ups, and very soon it will enable cross-border payments so that anyone coming into Nigeria can make USD to Naira transactions via Apple Pay or Google Pay wallets. The most exciting thing for Hassan is that anyone can use it, from Gen Zs’ to his 72-year-old mother. “ My mother doesn’t use bank apps, but she knows WhatsApp,” he says.
I ask if he is worried about platform risk—WhatsApp is ubiquitous but is foreign-owned and has had existential clashes with the government. Hassan acknowledges the risks but thinks it is minimal as it is unlikely that Meta would abandon its African market where the platform has become so entrenched in business and culture. “We have gotten approval from Meta to operate as a financial service provider on the platform, but we’re not betting on one platform,” Hassan says. The service will be available on iMessage, Telegram, and other secure platforms. “We’re where people already are.”
One of the technical elegance of Owo lies in its deposit-light approach. Unlike wallets, it holds no funds and simply facilitates transfers between Central Bank-regulated institutions. This is a contrarian approach in a fintech ecosystem where many startups are vying to be the first choice for customers’ deposits. This approach reveals one of the fundamental paradigms that Hassan operates with. “[Fintechs] are not here to compete with banks. Banks are the best place to store money,” he insists, citing their regulation by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and rare instances of failure. He holds a microfinance bank license but deems it an instrument that enhances credibility to traditional institutions, which he considers as partners. “We help them focus on security and growth while we handle the spending experience.”
Abdul’s worldview is shaped by a rejection of zero-sum thinking. Where some fintech founders rail against banks’ bureaucracy, he sees partnership. “Banks have been here for decades. They know security and money management,” he says. Mono complements this by focusing on user experience—spending, onboarding, verification—areas where banks lag.
This philosophy extends to Owo, which he predicts will dominate spending in five years. “Banks aren’t here to build beautiful apps,” he says. “Their job is to keep your money safe.” He believes that it is the most lucrative way for fintechs to derive the most value in the African market.
Hassan has more fundamental reasons for his aversion to holding funds. In 2022, Mono briefly ventured into virtual accounts and USD card issuing, a “shiny” trend that seemed more attractive after a major issuer in the space faced significant operational issues. While this foray proved to be a lucrative side road, generating substantial revenue, it ultimately became a significant distraction from Mono’s core mission.
“We didn’t own the infrastructure end-to-end,” Hassan explains. It was typical of Mono to own its entire infrastructure because of how this reliance on third-party APIs led to inconsistent user experiences. Going against the company’s values proved costly: when these third-party providers failed, it directly impacted Mono’s reputation. “I don’t want to wake up every morning thinking I have one trillion people’s money in my hand. All I want to think about is that I’m able to help you spend the money that you’ve safely stored in a licensed bank with a better experience.”
Leaving a mark everywhere
At the end of our nearly 90-minute call, Hassan is hungry—he has shuttled from one meeting to another, yet his energy remains infectious, his passion undimmed after a nearly two-hour call, and after five years in the trenches of entrepreneurship. Hassan recalls that someone once wondered why he hadn’t just given up and taken a role at a Silicon Valley startup.
“It’s not about the money,” he says. “It’s about building something people use, something that changes lives.” For him, the work isn’t done until Mono’s infrastructure is the backbone of every fintech app in Africa. “If I open an app and don’t see Mono, we’ve failed,” he says.
Until then, he’ll keep building.
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