You are Chidinma Okoye, co-founder and CEO of NairaReach, a Lagos fintech. Your board has just frozen the next funding tranche and given you twelve months to reach Nigerians who are genuinely outside the financial system. The first thing you must decide is who you will build for.
The situation
It is Monday, 9 March 2026, in Yaba, on the Lagos mainland. In three years NairaReach has reached 1.4 million registered users and 410,000 monthly actives, moves NGN 38 billion a year in transfers and bills NGN 2.9 billion. It still loses money: it burns NGN 180 million a quarter and has fourteen months of cash left. This morning you asked the board for the next NGN 4.5 billion to sign up more of the salaried, smartphone-owning city users the app already serves well.
The lead director answered with two numbers. About 38 million Nigerian adults, 36% of them, have no meaningful access to financial services. And 92% of NairaReach's active users already held a bank account before they opened the app. The tranche is frozen: you have twelve months to reach a genuinely excluded segment and show that serving it does not lose money. Today each active user leaves a contribution of −NGN 1,200 a year against a cost to serve of about NGN 2,100.
The excluded population earns NGN 30,000 to 80,000 a month and has never paid a bank fee. Only 40% own a smartphone; 55% live more than five kilometres from a branch, though nearly all live within a kilometre of a shop or kiosk. You have a NGN 1.2 billion launch budget and five segments profiled for the board: university students, Lagos and Abuja delivery riders, market women in secondary cities, Lagos informal traders and smallholder farmers in the north.