Allawee, a Nigerian card-issuing fintech, will close its business and personal account services on December 1, 2026, after Paystack acquired the company in 2025 in a deal that was not publicly announced, according to emails sent to Allawee customers.
In two emails seen by TechCabal, Allawee said its technology now operates within Paystack and told customers that “any payment sent to your Allawee account number from December 1 will fail,” adding that its cards will stop working regardless of the expiry date printed on them.
Allawee is the second fintech brand Paystack has acquired and folded into its operations this year, after it folded business banking startup Brass into its microfinance bank in June. Since January, Paystack has also acquired Ladder Microfinance Bank, giving it a banking licence, and restructured under a new holding company.
The deals show Paystack, Nigeria’s largest payments processor, assembling the pieces of a financial-services business through acquisitions rather than building each one from scratch.
Allawee and Paystack declined to comment on any part of this article.
Customers have until November 30 to withdraw their balances, share new bank details with anyone who pays them, and replace saved Allawee card details on subscriptions.
“Your money will remain yours,” Allawee said in the email. “It won’t expire or be forfeited, and any remaining balance will stay safely recorded. However, you’ll need to email [email protected] to request a manual payout. Because this process may take longer, we strongly recommend withdrawing your balance before the deadline.”
Founded in 2022 by Ikenna Enenwali and Oreofe Olurin, Allawee has changed direction twice. It launched as a credit card lender, then became a credit-risk software that other companies could plug into to check whether a borrower was likely to repay, before settling on card infrastructure—the systems banks and fintechs use to issue and run their own cards.
By May 2025, it was issuing cards for Piggyvest, Nomba, and Carbon through a dashboard that cut card launches from months to weeks. Enenwali, its co-founder and CEO, told TechCabal at the time that the company wanted to restore fintechs’ confidence in cards after years of Nigerian firms dropping Visa and Mastercard to cut costs.
Allawee also offered business accounts through a partnership with Providus Bank, a Nigerian commercial bank, and issued a Mastercard credit card aimed at federal civil servants and members of the National Youth Service Corps, Nigeria’s mandatory one-year service scheme for university graduates.
Now, those products are being split between two Paystack businesses.
Businesses using Allawee accounts are being directed to Paystack MFB, the microfinance bank created after Paystack acquired Ladder Microfinance Bank in January. Individuals are being directed to Zap, Paystack’s consumer transfer app, according to the emails.
Balances, account numbers, transaction history, and verification records will not carry over, so customers have to open new accounts from scratch.
The value of Allawee for Paystack likely lies less in its customer accounts than in the card infrastructure it had already built. Enenwali told TechCabal that building a card programme from scratch could take one to two years. For Paystack, once it held its own banking licence, the Providus-backed Allawee accounts were in direct competition with Paystack’s microfinance bank. The same logic ended Brass, the business banking startup a Paystack-led consortium rescued in 2024 and folded into Paystack MFB before July 31 this year.
Outside of Paystack, this pattern runs across Nigeria’s fintech sector. The 2020 to 2022 funding boom left Nigerian fintechs building overlapping products, and tighter capital and closer regulatory scrutiny have since pushed the market toward consolidation. Buying a rival is now often cheaper and faster than building the same thing.
In January, Flutterwave acquired open banking startup Mono to own the financial data layer beneath the payments it processes, giving it direct account-to-account rails that settle instantly and bypass the fees and failure rates of card networks, plus the identity and bank-verification data it needs to move beyond processing into credit and other financial services.
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