Grace Ashiru
Dubai is no longer just a stopover for African business travellers. For a growing number of the continent’s fintech companies, it has become a strategic launchpad for global expansion — and the momentum is accelerating.
Egypt’s MNT-Halan has entered the UAE market with salary-financing products, while Paymob now holds a full UAE Central Bank licence and operates across the Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Oman. Nigeria’s Innovate1Pay has been running its global operations from Dubai’s Jumeirah district since 2019. Flutterwave, which already moved into Saudi Arabia and Bahrain last year, is preparing to set up a UAE presence as well.
The logic is simple: money. An estimated 3 to 5 million African migrants live and work across the GCC, sending remittances home at rates that average between 8% and 9% per transaction — some of the steepest transfer costs anywhere in the world. With the World Bank pegging total remittances to Africa at $109 billion in 2024, roughly a third of that flowing from Gulf states, the market opportunity is enormous. And most of it still moves through cash.
That gap is precisely what Ghana’s Zeepay is angling to close. Already active in 25 countries, the payment firm is now targeting the UAE as its entry point into the Gulf. Rather than launching a standalone office immediately, Zeepay is pursuing partnerships with digital payment players already established in Dubai and Abu Dhabi to test demand for an African remittance corridor. Kojo Amofa, the company’s Partnerships Manager, says regional instability has only sharpened the case for what they’re building: migrant workers need faster, cheaper ways to send money home, and the current climate makes that need more urgent.
Beyond remittances, the Gulf is attracting African fintechs for another reason: capital. In 2025, African fintechs raised $1.5 billion across 150 deals, with GCC sovereign wealth funds and family offices playing an increasingly active role. The numbers back the interest — Boston Consulting Group projects the continent’s fintech revenues will grow thirteenfold to $65 billion by 2030. Nigeria’s Moove.io tapped that appetite in 2022, raising a $30 million sukuk through Franklin Templeton in Dubai. Kenya’s M-Pesa has partnered with the UAE’s ADI Foundation — backed by IHC, a $240 billion conglomerate chaired by the UAE president’s brother — to explore blockchain infrastructure.
Digital payments dominate Africa’s fintech story today, but the next wave is already taking shape: SME lending, credit and full-stack digital banking. As that build-out accelerates, the Gulf corridor becomes less a side project and more a structural feature of how African fintech scales globally.
