On a humid evening in Lagos in early 2023, Kelvin Edionwe found himself in a situation many Nigerians had become all too familiar with. His phone battery had died, cash was scarce due to the government’s chaotic naira redesign, and digital transfers were failing. What should have been a routine bus ride home turned into an hour-long walk on foot.
For most people, this might have been an inconvenience, something to rant about later and move on. For Kelvin, it became the seed of an idea that would evolve into Paywise - a fintech startup determined to change how payments work in Africa. “That day was tough,” he recalls.
“I am not the type to stop strangers and ask for help. With no cash and no way to transfer money, I just walked home. And while walking, I kept thinking, why should payments stop working just because my phone is down? Surely, there’s a better way.”
That single frustrating moment triggered a journey that would take him from being a product designer to a fintech founder, building a product that now processes millions of naira in transactions every month and has begun to attract global recognition.
The designer who turned to fintech
Kelvin did not begin his career in finance or payments. His training was in computer science and software engineering, and he later earned a diploma in software engineering. But it was design — the art of shaping user experiences — that captured his imagination.
“I loved talking to users, hearing their feedback, and giving them an amazing experience,” he says. That passion led him into product design, a career he pursued for nearly eight years, working across industries from Web3 to healthcare.
His first brushes with fintech came when he worked on a couple of payments-related projects. While these gave him exposure to the sector, he still believed the space was saturated and that most new fintech startups were “copy and paste” versions of existing models.
But the currency crisis of 2023 — when Nigerians were forced to swap old naira notes for new ones, causing widespread cash scarcity and transaction failures — revealed a deeper fragility in the system.
Kelvin recalls seeing shopkeepers without smartphones reverting to pen-and-paper ledgers, noting down who owed what because digital transfers were failing. “It was chaos,” he says.
“I could see people in my area who did not have smartphones, or were not digitally inclined, and they went on for days without being able to sell anything. At that point, they started using notebooks; they would write down on physical notes, oh, this person took something for 10,000 naira, this person took this particular thing..”
“Everyone started having issues with money transfer; the digital transaction space in 2023 was not really ready for that volume of transactions, so it's kind of collapsed most of the time, especially for traditional banks,” he says. “Even new banks like OPay and Moniepoint, which had better systems, didn’t have enough penetration to cover everyone.”
For Kelvin, the crisis was not just about inconvenience. It exposed a gap that no existing fintech seemed to be solving — the ability to make payments even in the most constrained conditions.
Building the impossible
That night, after his long walk home, Kelvin called two people he trusted: his younger sister, Tovia Edionwe,the COO of Paywise, a frontend engineer then working at IBM, and a close friend, Ben Iyare, CTO of the company, who was with Johnson & Johnson at the time. Together, the three of them became the founding team of Paywise.
“At first, even my co-founders thought what I was proposing was impossible,” Kelvin admits. “How could you send money without the sender’s device being active? How could the receiver’s phone initiate a payment on behalf of the sender? Everything in finance had always required two active parties. But I was convinced there was a way.”
They began experimenting as a side project through 2023. By the end of that year, they had a working prototype. By the first quarter of 2024, they had an MVP that allowed users to transfer money using only the receiver’s device.
“When we tested it, most people were confused at first. They had never seen something like this. But once they experienced it, they got it,” Kelvin recalls.
The team’s breakthrough feature allowed a user to walk up to someone, input their phone number and amount on the receiver’s device, authenticate with a facial scan, and complete the transaction. It was an elegant solution to a very African problem - unreliable connectivity, device failures, and everyday unpredictabilities that can derail payments.
Paywise’s business model is straightforward: it earns revenue directly from end users by charging a flat fee of ₦21 per transaction - significantly lower than what traditional banks and some established fintech companies charge.
Kelvin explains: “What we charge is essentially the standard flat fee across fintechs. Traditional banks, however, often charge much higher — sometimes up to ₦50 per transaction. Of course, banks still enjoy the upper hand because they’ve built decades of trust, having been around for 20 or 30 years. But with Paywise, our ₦21 fee offers a more affordable option for everyday users.”
More than just urban convenience
As they tested Paywise in the market, another layer of need surfaced. A trader pointed out that most fintech solutions were built for urban smartphone users, while millions in rural areas neither had smartphones nor bank accounts. That challenge sparked Paywise’s second innovation: enabling money transfers via SMS.
“If someone only has a feature phone, they can still receive money as long as they have a working phone number,” Kelvin explains. The sender simply enters the number and amount, and the recipient receives confirmation by text. No bank account is needed. It was a solution reminiscent of Kenya’s M-Pesa, but adapted to Nigeria’s context.
This feature quickly caught the attention of NGOs and humanitarian agencies. Large-scale disbursements often get siphoned by middlemen before reaching beneficiaries.
With Paywise, organizations could upload beneficiary details in a simple spreadsheet and disburse funds directly to thousands of people at once. “If the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation wants to send $100 each to 5,000 farmers, they can now do that directly, without leakage,” Kelvin says.
In 2024, this feature helped Paywise secure a $20,000 grant from the Gates Foundation, which the team used to develop the second version of their MVP. Soon after, Paywise was used to disburse stipends to youth in Lagos learning vocational skills — another pilot that proved how effectively it could cut out intermediaries and ensure transparency.
Wrestling with infrastructure and regulation
As with any fintech in Africa, Paywise’s story is also one of navigating daunting infrastructural and regulatory challenges. The cost of a Payment Service Provider license in Nigeria is about $140,000 - an impossible sum for a bootstrapped startup.
Initially, the team piggybacked on Flutterwave’s license, but the fees ate up most of their margins. Later, they tried Anchor, a younger payment gateway, but its infrastructure struggled to meet their needs.
Each pivot meant months of delay. At one point, they had to shut down temporarily to build their own rails for services like KYC, because third-party partners couldn’t deliver. “Those were some of the toughest months,” Kelvin says. “But we knew if we didn’t take ownership of our infrastructure, we’d never scale.”
Gaining traction
Despite the hurdles, Paywise managed to launch publicly in September 2024 through a trade fair in Lagos. The event brought small businesses and customers together to test the product in real-world conditions. By the end of the fair, Paywise had 500 users. Within months, that number grew to 2,000.
As of mid-2025, Paywise has about 1,650 active users, with over 5,000 more on its iOS waitlist. Each month, it processes between ₦7 million and ₦11 million in transactions. “The demand is clear,” Kelvin says. “We get messages almost daily asking when our iOS version will be ready.”
Competing in Africa’s crowded fintech space
Nigeria’s fintech scene is famously crowded, with giants like OPay, Moniepoint, and Kuda now unicorns. So how does a small startup like Paywise hope to stand out? For Kelvin, the answer lies in differentiation.
“The big players solved speed - making transfers faster than traditional banks. But speed is no longer enough. We’re solving problems others aren’t touching: payments that work even when the sender’s device doesn’t, inclusion for the unbanked, and corruption-free disbursements for NGOs. These are use cases no one else is addressing at scale.”
Growing interest from iOS users
“Right now, we have close to 5,000 people on our waitlist for iOS. We even get messages asking, ‘When is your product coming out for Apple?’ People really want to use our platform on iOS,” he says.
In terms of traction, Kelvin adds: “If we combine our waitlist and active users, we’re looking at close to 8,000 users. At the moment, about 1,650 are actively using the platform. Since December, we’ve processed transactions worth between ₦7 million and ₦11 million.”
The road ahead
Looking forward, Paywise is clear about its ambitions. The startup has chosen the domain Paywise.africa for a reason - its vision is to dominate the African market, starting with Nigeria and expanding strategically.
While Ghana and Kenya are natural next steps, Kelvin is wary of burning money in hyper-competitive markets. Instead, the team is studying emerging opportunities in countries like Botswana, where digital payments are growing but competition is thinner.
Kevin hopes to become profitable in the next two years. In the long term, Paywise plans to secure its own licenses, build blockchain-based rails, and expand its suite of services. But growth will be steady, not reckless. “We want to be sustainable,” Kelvin insists. “Raising money is not the goal. Building something that works for people is.”
The startup is currently bootstrapped, though Kelvin has begun approaching a few venture capital firms and is hopeful of attracting investor interest as the company continues to grow.
Lessons from the journey
For Kelvin, the biggest lesson is about focus. In a continent where investors are growing cautious about “yet another fintech,” differentiation is key. “VCs are not writing cheques for startups that look like clones of existing unicorns,” he says. “If you’re not solving something unique, you won’t get funded.”
His advice to aspiring founders is blunt. “Don’t build just to raise money. Investor money is not free - you will pay it back, sometimes at 5x or 10x because of currency differences. Build a product that people truly need. If you solve real problems, growth and funding will follow.”
From a walk to a movement
What began with a one-hour walk home in Lagos is today a company helping farmers, traders, NGOs, and everyday Nigerians transact with more confidence. For Kelvin, it is proof that sometimes the biggest innovations come not from boardrooms or billion-dollar labs, but from ordinary frustrations that demand extraordinary solutions.
“I was just a product designer who loved solving user problems,” he reflects. “That day on the road, I became someone determined to solve Africa’s payment problem. And that’s what Paywise is about - giving people the ability to transact no matter what, in the simplest way possible.”