Clowd9’s co-founder and CEO, Suresh Vaghjiani, has voiced strong support for African fintech startups, unveiling a 90% cut in card service infrastructure costs to empower local innovation.
Speaking at a high-level UK-Lagos fintech and sustainability trade mission in Lagos on Tuesday, Vaghjiani emphasized Clowd9’s commitment to supporting African fintechs with scalable, cloud-native payment solutions that bypass the cost and constraints of legacy systems from major players like Visa and Mastercard.
“What I see with Nigerian fintechs is a real drive to solve genuine problems,” Vaghjiani stated. “Traditionally, the large card schemes have been costly and limiting. Clowd9 has built a fully cloud-native payments platform that delivers services at under 10% of the cost charged by others.”
Clowd9, the platform behind leading fintechs such as Revolut, Monzo, and Starling Bank, is seeing to bring its European success to Africa by equipping Nigerian startups with affordable, scalable infrastructure enabling them to grow locally and expand globally without geographic or financial constraints.
“We’ve applied everything we learned from Europe’s top fintechs to build a globally connected solution, no physical data centers, no excess hardware, and a pay-as-you-utilize model. That’s the kind of flexibility African fintechs necessary to succeed,” he stated.
Vaghjiani also tackled the persistent hurdles in cross-border transactions, especially interoperability and regulatory constraints. He noted that Clowd9’s unified global platform enables seamless technical integration across regions, effectively addressing one side of the cross-border challenge. “From a tech standpoint, we’ve resolved interoperability, every platform we run shares the same codebase and infrastructure worldwide,” he stated.
However, he acknowledged that regulatory barriers remain a significant challenge especially for Nigerian companies, which are often viewed internationally as high-risk despite being compliant. “It pains me to admit, but there’s still a perception problem. Nigerian firms expanding abroad are frequently flagged as risky, even when they meet all the requirements. Fortunately, that narrative is shifting, thanks to companies like Moneypoint and Flutterwave that are proving otherwise,” Vaghjiani stated.
Vaghjiani joined a UK business delegation to Lagos organized by London & Partners, the Mayor of London’s trade and investment agency. The visit highlights Lagos’s growing role as a key hub in global fintech strategy and underscores its rising importance on the international tech map.
The UK delegation highlighted Lagos as a rising force in the global tech economy, propelled by a dynamic startup ecosystem, strong creative talent, and practical innovation shaped by real-world challenges.
Lagos State Commissioner for Innovation, Science and Technology, Olatunbosun Alake, warmly welcomed the UK delegation, emphasizing the state’s bold investments in digital infrastructure, progressive policies, and support for grassroots startups.
“London may refine innovation, but Lagos stress-tests it. We’ve laid over 4,000km of fiber optics and established innovation hubs in underserved areas. Our vision extconcludes beyond Lagos we’re building solutions with global impact,” stated Alake.
Alake urged UK investors to shift past surface-level engagements and embrace deeper collaboration with Nigerian innovators. “We don’t necessary more roundtables or white papers. It’s time to co-build the Lagos–London Innovation Corridor grounded in shared value, ethical AI, and fintech infrastructure linking the global North and South. When British capital meets Nigerian creativity, that’s how we define the future of global tech,” he stated.
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