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Nigerian payments company Paystack is set to shut down the standalone services of card-issuing fintech Allawee from December 1, 2026, following an acquisition completed in 2025 that was not publicly disclosed at the time.
Allawee informed customers through emails that its technology now operates within Paystack and that its business and personal account services will be discontinued at the end of November.
The fintech warned customers that payments made to their Allawee account numbers from December 1 would fail, while existing Allawee cards would also stop working regardless of their printed expiry dates.
Customers have until November 30 to withdraw their balances, provide new banking details to people or businesses that make payments to them and update Allawee card information linked to recurring subscriptions.
“Your money will remain yours,” Allawee told customers, explaining that balances would not expire or be forfeited. Customers who fail to withdraw their funds before the deadline will be required to contact Paystack’s support team for a manual payout, a process the company said could take longer.
Neither Allawee nor Paystack provided comments on the acquisition or the decision to discontinue Allawee’s standalone operations.
Another fintech folded into Paystack
The move makes Allawee the second fintech brand Paystack has absorbed into its operations in 2026.
In June, Paystack integrated business banking startup Brass into Paystack Microfinance Bank (MFB), following the company’s acquisition of Ladder Microfinance Bank in January.
The acquisition of Ladder gave Paystack access to a microfinance banking licence and enabled the payments company to expand further into financial services.
Paystack also reorganised its corporate structure under a new holding company earlier in the year.
The sequence of transactions points to a broader strategy in which Paystack is using acquisitions to assemble a wider financial-services ecosystem rather than developing every product internally.
From lending to card infrastructure
Allawee was founded in 2022 by Ikenna Enenwali and Oreofe Olurin and has undergone several changes in its business model.
The company initially launched as a credit card lender before pivoting to credit-risk technology that enabled other businesses to assess the likelihood of borrowers repaying loans.
It later moved into card infrastructure, providing the technology required by banks and fintech companies to issue and manage payment cards.
By May 2025, Allawee was providing card infrastructure to companies including Piggyvest, Nomba and Carbon through a platform designed to shorten the time required to launch card programmes from months to weeks.
At the time, Enenwali said the company wanted to rebuild confidence in card products among Nigerian fintechs after several businesses had reduced their reliance on Visa and Mastercard because of the cost of operating card programmes.
Allawee also provided business accounts through a partnership with Providus Bank and launched a Mastercard credit card designed to provide access to credit for federal civil servants and members of the National Youth Service Corps.
Those products will now be redirected across Paystack’s existing financial-services businesses.
Accounts moving to Paystack platforms
According to the customer notices, businesses that previously used Allawee accounts will be directed to Paystack MFB, while individual customers will be referred to Zap, Paystack’s consumer transfer application.
However, the transition will not involve a direct migration of customer records.
Customers will have to open new accounts because their Allawee balances, account numbers, transaction histories and verification records will not automatically transfer to the new platforms.
The restructuring effectively places Allawee’s business banking activities within Paystack MFB while directing consumer users towards Paystack’s consumer-facing platform.
For Paystack, the strategic value of Allawee may therefore lie less in its existing customer accounts and more in the technology and expertise developed around card issuance.
Enenwali previously said building a card programme from scratch could take between one and two years. Acquiring an established card infrastructure business could therefore allow Paystack to accelerate its expansion into financial services.
The acquisition of Ladder and the integration of Allawee also changed the strategic rationale for Allawee’s Providus-backed accounts, which would increasingly overlap with Paystack’s own banking operations.
A similar consideration contributed to the integration of Brass, the business banking startup that a Paystack-led consortium rescued in 2024 before ultimately folding its operations into Paystack MFB.
Fintech consolidation gathers pace
Paystack’s approach reflects a wider consolidation trend across Nigeria’s fintech sector.
The funding boom between 2020 and 2022 encouraged startups to develop overlapping products and services across payments, banking, lending and financial infrastructure. As funding conditions tightened and regulatory scrutiny increased, companies have increasingly had to prioritise sustainable business models and operational efficiency.
Acquisitions can provide a faster route to capabilities, licences, technology and customers than building competing infrastructure from the ground up.
Other major fintech companies have adopted similar strategies.
Flutterwave, for instance, acquired open banking company Mono in January, giving the payments company greater control over financial data infrastructure and account-to-account payment capabilities.
The transaction also provides access to identity and bank-verification data that could support Flutterwave’s expansion into additional financial services beyond traditional payment processing.
For Paystack, the continued integration of acquired businesses suggests a similar ambition: to build a broader financial-services platform by combining payments infrastructure, banking capabilities, card technology and consumer financial products.
The closure of Allawee as a standalone brand is therefore less an isolated shutdown than another step in the restructuring of Nigeria’s fintech landscape, where consolidation is increasingly becoming a strategy for acquiring technology, regulatory capabilities and market access in a more competitive environment.
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