Kora Chief Legal Officer Enyioma Madubuike explains how fintechs can scale across Africa’s fragmented rules, and why localisation beats copy-paste expansion.
Kora’s Chief Legal Officer Enyioma Madubuike has outlined how African fintechs can balance fast growth with regulatory compliance across multiple markets.
In a new executive spotlight, Madubuike, Chief Legal Officer at Kora, shared lessons from building compliance systems and navigating regulation across African countries.
He described Africa as a fragmented regulatory environment, meaning rules, licensing requirements, reporting formats, and enforcement can differ sharply from one country to the next. For fintechs, that affects cross-border payments, digital banking products, and the financial infrastructure that powers merchants and consumers.
Madubuike’s core message was that compliance is not only a legal checkbox. It is a strategic function that can decide how quickly a fintech can launch, which partners it can work with, and whether it can keep operating when regulators change the rules.
He also pushed back on the idea that a company can simply replicate a playbook from one market into another. Localisation matters, which means adapting products, processes, and internal controls to local laws, local regulators, and local customer risk patterns, rather than copying a setup that worked elsewhere.
Many African fintechs want multi-country growth, but scaling finance products is not like scaling a typical consumer app. Financial services are heavily regulated because they touch money movement, fraud risk, and consumer protection.
For operators, the takeaway is practical. Budget for compliance early, hire local expertise when entering new markets, and design operations so reporting and audit needs are easy to meet. “Compliance systems from scratch” usually means policies, risk checks, monitoring, and documentation, not just contracts.
For investors, this is also a risk lens. A fintech’s ability to maintain licences, pass audits, and build regulator trust can determine durability in payments and banking across Africa.
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