$1.5bn a month flows through Paga. Here's roughly how much it keeps.

Tayo Oviosu, founder and chief executive of the Nigerian payments company Paga, gave an unusually direct account of the business in an interview with School of Hard Knocks, the video series that returned to Nigeria to feature him.

He said Paga processes more than $1.5 billion every month and employs over 200 people. He described the company as worth hundreds of millions of dollars, adding that it was hard to give an exact figure. And he said the company made about $60 million in revenue in one year.

He also made the case for Africa as a market for financial services, pointing to its young population. By his figure, about 60% of Africans are under 25.

In Simple Terms

Paga is a digital payments company. It lets people and businesses send money, pay bills and buy airtime, including through a network of agents that serves people who don't have bank accounts.

The three numbers Oviosu gave measure three completely different things. How much money moves through the company. How much the company earns from that movement. And what someone might pay to own the company. Most coverage treated the first as if it were the second.

The Money

Start with the flow. When someone sends money through Paga, the full amount counts toward the $1.5 billion a month — but it belongs to the recipient, not Paga. Paga earns only its fee on each transaction.

What Paga keeps is the revenue figure: about $60 million in one year, by Oviosu's account. He did not say which year.

Put the two together and you get the shape of the business. At $1.5 billion a month, Paga moves roughly $18 billion a year. (Derived.) Against $60 million of revenue, that works out to about 33 cents kept for every $100 moved.

The Bigger Picture

Payments companies are built on taking a very small slice of a very large flow, which is why volume dominates their marketing. It is almost always the biggest number available, and it is easy to mistake for success.

Paga's growth has been real by any measure. In April 2024 it said it had processed ₦14 trillion across 15 years, with about 80% of that in the most recent five, and that its agent network had created around 1,000 direct and over 100,000 indirect jobs. In 2019 it reported 14.4 million customers.

Rainingmoney context

Comparing dollar volumes across years is harder than it looks. Most of Paga's transactions are in naira, and the naira has lost substantial value against the dollar in recent years. That means a dollar figure for today's naira transactions converts at a much weaker rate than it did in 2019. The underlying growth in naira terms is therefore probably larger than the dollar comparison suggests, but the two sets of dollar figures are not measured on the same ruler.

In 2020 the group moved its holding company from Mauritius to the United Kingdom, citing bureaucratic difficulties the year before. At the time, the group held operations in Nigeria, Mexico, Ethiopia and the UK.

The Jargon

Transaction volume — the total value of all payments processed through a platform. Most of it belongs to the people sending and receiving, not the platform.

Revenue — the money a company earns from its services before costs. For a payments firm, mostly fees.

Take rate — the share of each transaction a payments company keeps as revenue. Here, roughly a third of one percent.

Valuation — what a company is judged to be worth. For a private company, usually the price investors paid in its most recent funding round.

Agent network — shops and individuals who handle cash deposits and withdrawals for a payments company, reaching customers without bank accounts.

What Happens Next

Known. Paga is private and doesn't publish audited accounts. All figures in the interview are Oviosu's own.

Possible. If Paga raises new funding or moves toward a public listing, its revenue, profit and valuation would become far clearer.

Unknown. Which year the $60 million covers. Whether Paga is profitable — revenue is not profit, and nothing in the interview addresses costs. What rate was used to put naira volumes into dollars. And how the current "over 200 employees" relates to the roughly 1,000 direct jobs the company cited in 2024, which may simply be a different measure.

Rainingmoney's Take

Analysis, not reporting.

The most valuable thing in this interview is not the $1.5 billion. It is that a Nigerian fintech founder volunteered a revenue number at all. Most don't, and readers are left to judge companies by the flattering metric.

That candour deserves credit, and it also deserves precision in how it's reported. The initial coverage described the $60 million as Oviosu's personal peak earnings, while his own quoted words describe it as company revenue. That is not a small slip: it is the difference between a founder's pay and his company's entire income.

The honest summary is that Paga is a large, established payments business that keeps a thin slice of a big flow. Whether that slice is profitable is the question the interview didn't answer, and it is the one that matters most.