A decade ago, the typical African bank saw fintech startups as competitors chipping away at transaction fees, or at best, vendors selling software. That posture has shifted. Banks across the continent are now writing cheques into the same startups they once eyed warily, and in some cases launching their own fintech subsidiaries from scratch. Corporate venture capital, once a marginal category in African deal-making, is becoming one of its more consequential sources of funding.

The scale of the shift shows up in the numbers. Corporate venture funding into African startups rose 44 percent in the first half of 2025 to roughly $1.4 billion across 26 deals, the strongest showing since the 2021–2022 boom, according to data reported by Tech In Africa. Local investors, banks prominent among them, now account for a much larger share of the continent’s venture activity than they did three years ago.

From Skeptics to Shareholders

The reasons banks are moving into venture investing are not mysterious. Fintechs proved, often at the banks’ own expense, that there was money in leaner, faster, mobile-first financial products. Rather than keep losing customers to challengers, several Nigerian banking groups chose to compete by building or buying into the same space, then went further by backing external startups whose technology or reach they could not easily replicate in-house.

Regulation gave this shift its specific shape. A 2010 Central Bank of Nigeria directive pushed the industry away from universal banking, restricting licensed banks to core activities and requiring anything outside that scope – capital markets, payments infrastructure, asset management – to be housed under a separate holding company, as explained in Lexology’s overview of Nigerian banking regulation. That rule, refined in 2014 and now…