POD - Nikolai Barnwell on building PawaPay without the VC machine, and why mobile money beats cards
PawaPay CEO Nikolai Barnwell on why payments, not "fintech", is the real problem worth solving, what a decade at 88mph taught him about funding, and why he is betting the continent's rails on mobile money over cards.
Episode overview:
Nikolai Barnwell has been resident in Kenya since 2009, and he watched the African mobile money story arrive in real time. Fresh out of university, he joined the early Africa-focused fund 88mph as a programme manager, helping build what is now Nairobi Garage, and got a front-row seat to roughly 50 investments over five years. Most went nowhere.
The ones that did, betting business BetPawa among them, taught him something more durable than any single exit: the shape of how mobile money and mobile internet would spread across the continent, market by market, with a lag you could almost set your watch by.
In conversation with Andile Masuku, Barnwell traces the line from that vantage point to PawaPay, the pan-African payments business he now runs. The throughline is a refusal to confuse the label for the thing. "Fintech" is too broad to mean much, he argues. What PawaPay actually does is narrower and harder: make it possible for businesses to transact across a fragmented continent, owning the technology end to end rather than stitching together other people's connections.
Barnwell's reflections on venture capital, the founder-funder incentive mismatch, and PawaPay's decision to stay out of the last fintech funding boom were previewed in the companion op-ed, Are founders and funders on the same page? Notes from an unreleased PawaPay conversation. This episode opens up the rest: the mobile-money-over-cards thesis, the direct-integration moat, the customer base that runs from ride-hailing to remittances, and a candid back-and-forth on stablecoins and the limits of central bank control.
Andile Masuku
Key insights:
On why "fintech" is a near-useless qualifier: Barnwell's opening move is to dismantle the category that frames the whole conversation. Almost every business today touches finance and technology, so claiming to be a fintech says little. The useful question is which specific problem you solve. For PawaPay, it is the one businesses cannot avoid: in order to sell, you have to be able to collect, and on a continent where most transactions are still cash and the payment landscape is splintered across markets, collecting at scale is genuinely difficult.
On betting mobile money over cards: PawaPay deliberately touches no credit cards at all. Barnwell's reasoning is that the card is a technology from the 1970s, shoehorned into modern infrastructure by legacy rather than fit, and weighed down by messy settlement, complex schemes, fraud, and cost. Where a market can leapfrog straight to something better, he sees little reason for cards to claim a meaningful share. So PawaPay built its core rails around mobile money as the alternative financial infrastructure, a bet on where consumer payments are heading rather than where they have been.
On owning the technology as the actual moat: The continent's payments market splits into a handful of genuinely pan-African players and many smaller local providers serving one or two countries deeply. PawaPay sits in the first camp with a distinguishing choice: no downstream partners. It integrates directly into the mobile money wallets across its markets rather than reselling other providers' connections. For a payments business living on slim margins and dependent on volume, that direct, broad footprint and end-to-end quality control is what separates it from the aggregators.
On the customer base nobody pitches: What PawaPay collects and disburses reveals more than any deck. Beyond the betting companies that anchor its volume, it serves ride-hailing operators like Yango and Bolt, cash-transfer outfit GiveDirectly, broadcasters DSTV and Canal+, international money transfer operators moving remittances in, and, notably, the Jehovah's Witnesses. The common thread is organisations that need the mobile money infrastructure to simply work across twenty-odd countries, and would rather not build and babysit that plumbing themselves. The hard part, Barnwell stresses, is not the integration but the operational resilience when hundreds of millions of dollars move in both directions every month.
On stablecoins and the central bank problem: Barnwell is openly enthusiastic about distributed ledgers, which remove the third-party verification that banks, cards, and even mobile money still require, and he calls crypto the joker in the room. PawaPay already offers a stablecoin product. But his optimism is tempered by a structural catch: once a country opens the faucet between local currency and hard-currency stablecoins, its central bank loses the ability to control the flow of funds and, with it, a tool for propping up artificially supported currencies. He expects regulators across Kenya, Ghana, Rwanda, and Nigeria to take a step or two back once they grasp the implications, just as South Africa is now reclassifying crypto as a capital asset to close a capital-controls gap that stayed open for over a year.
Notable moments:
- The 88mph rollercoaster: Barnwell's account of a fifty-company portfolio funded largely by friends and family, structured as a holding company rather than a conventional fund, with the emotional whiplash of watching most bets fail while a few compounded slowly into something large. His candour about not really knowing what they were doing at the time anchors the whole conversation in earned humility.
- The BetPawa-to-PawaPay path: How a payments capability built in-house to serve a betting business became its own company. Because payments is merchant-agnostic, the same infrastructure could be opened to other industries at little additional cost, turning an internal tool into a pan-African platform almost opportunistically.
- The "I didn't renew my card" confession: Barnwell admits he let his Kenyan bank debit card lapse around 2022 and now disdains every online merchant that will not take mobile money. The anecdote captures, in miniature, a conviction that runs through the business: mobile money is simply the superior technology.
- The betting and human-potential exchange: A long, frank stretch in which Masuku presses his own deep reservations about the gambling industry, the gamification of being online and its cost to the continent's most valuable resource, human potential, while Barnwell, a former betting-industry operator, makes a defensive case for nuance and responsible participation. Masuku's VC scepticism, explored fully in the companion op-ed, surfaces here too in lighter quips, with Barnwell conceding he sits closer to that camp than listeners might expect.