Clowd9 co-founder and chief executive officer, Suresh Vaghjiani, has thrown his weight behind local fintech startups, while announcing a 90 per cent reduction in card service infrastructure costs for African startups.
Vaghjiani, at a high-level UK-Lagos fintech and sustainability trade mission in Lagos, on Tuesday, outlined Clowd9’s commitment to empowering African fintechs with scalable, cloud-native payment technology that sidesteps the limitations and cost barriers of legacy systems offered by global giants like Visa and Mastercard.
“What I think about the fintechs in Nigeria is that they are solving some real problems. Historically, the large card schemes have been extremely expensive and restrictive. What Clowd9 has done is to build an end-to-end cloud-native payments platform that delivers services at less than 10 percent of what other providers charge,” Vaghjiani stated.
Clowd9, whose platform powers leading fintechs like Revolut, Monzo, and Starling Bank, aims to replicate its European success in Africa by offering Nigerian startups the infrastructure to scale both locally and globally without prohibitive costs or geographic limitations.
“We have taken everything we have learned from Europe’s leading fintechs and applied it to create a globally connected solution. No physical data centers. No unnecessary hardware. You only pay for what you use. This is exactly the kind of flexibility African fintechs need to thrive,” he said.
Vaghjiani also addressed the longstanding challenges around cross-border transactions, particularly interoperability and regulatory friction. He explained that Clowd9’s standardised global platform ensures seamless technical integration regardless of geography, solving one half of the cross-border problem. “Technologically, we have solved the interoperability issue. All our platforms share the same code base, same infrastructure, globally,” he said.
However, he admitted that regulatory hurdles remain a tougher challenge, particularly for Nigerian companies often perceived internationally as higher-risk entities. “It makes me sad to say, but there is still a perception issue. Nigerian companies trying to operate overseas are often seen as high risk, even when they are compliant. But that is changing, as companies like Moneypoint and Flutterwave are proving that perception wrong,” Vaghjiani noted.
Vaghjiani was part of a UK business delegation to Lagos led by London & Partners, a trade and investment promotion agency backed by the Mayor of London. The visit underscores the increasing importance of Lagos, Africa’s fintech capital, in global technology strategy.
The UK delegation emphasised Lagos’s emergence as a vital node in the global tech economy, driven by a vibrant startup scene, creative talent, and real-world innovation that solves problems under challenging conditions.
The Lagos state commissioner for Innovation, Science and Technology, Olatunbosun Alake, offered a spirited welcome to the delegation and highlighted the state’s aggressive investment in digital infrastructure, policy innovation, and grassroots startup support.
“London may refine innovation, but Lagos stress-tests it. We have deployed over 4,000km of fiber optics and launched hubs across underserved communities. We are not just building for Lagos, we are building for global impact,” Alake stated.
Alake called on UK investors to go beyond transactional partnerships and embrace co-creation with local innovators. “This is not the time for another roundtable or white paper. It is time to build the Lagos–London Innovation Corridor—with shared value, ethical AI, and fintech rails that connect the global North and South. When the British capital meets Nigerian creativity, that is when we shape the future of global technology,” Alake stated.
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