Neronie Arnagiri spends her days thinking about things most fintech founders tend to ignore until it is too late. Things like contradictory tax classifications across borders, unclear reporting obligations, and the quiet danger of building a billion-dollar company on ground that regulators might decide, tomorrow, does not belong to the occupant.
She is the Head of Tax at PawaPay, a mobile money aggregator that processed 2.5 billion transactions across 20 African markets last year with 100 percent uptime. That number alone makes her worth listening to. But the reason her voice matters right now is timing.
African fintech is entering what regulators are calling a year of maturity. The era of building first and asking for permission later is ending. In 2025, Nigeria raised capital requirements for payment service providers to NGN 5 B (~USD 3.6 M) and rejected nearly 40 percent of applicants.
Meanwhile, Ghana and Morocco began licensing crypto providers after years of watching citizens use them anyway. And last October, the Financial Action Task Force finally removed Nigeria and South Africa from its grey list, signalling that compliance is no longer optional.
Arnagiri has been watching this shift from inside one of the continent’s largest payment processors. When asked where fintechs most commonly cut corners on tax and compliance while scaling, she says the pressure to move quickly often outpaces the discipline needed to align legal structure, tax treatment, and local obligations.
“What usually gets underestimated is not the importance of compliance, but the complexity of keeping it consistent across markets,” she tells WT. The strongest operators, she adds, build tax and regulatory discipline into market entry and product design, rather than trying to retrofit it later.
That complexity becomes even sharper across borders. PawaPay operates in over 20 markets, and Arnagiri points to a central contradiction. “The same business activity can be viewed very differently from one jurisdiction to another,” she says.
A company may see one integrated payments model, but regulators and tax authorities in different markets may classify the risks, revenue flows, or reporting obligations differently. This creates tension between the need for group consistency and the reality of local legal interpretation. Managing that contradiction, she says, “is one of the core challenges of pan-African fintech.”
At PawaPay, she says the answer has been to build local entities that understand the intent of the law, not just the text. That kind of infrastructure is expensive and slow. But it is also becoming the difference between companies that survive enforcement waves and those that do not.
Nikolai Barnwell, PawaPay’s CEO, put it more bluntly in a recent interview. He said 2026 is the year African regulators will stop tolerating scale without operational control across critical digital infrastructure sectors, especially payments. As transaction volumes grow, digital payment rails will increasingly be treated as national infrastructure rather than high-growth tech products.
That shift is already visible in how investors behave. Arnagiri says governance weaknesses may not always show up publicly, but they surface during diligence, licensing discussions, and partnership reviews.
“Weak documentation, unclear responsibilities, inconsistent structures, or unresolved compliance issues can slow decisions, raise perceived risk, and lead to more conservative pricing or delayed expansion,” she says. “Investors increasingly want to see that growth is supported by substance, not just ambition.”
This is where her role intersects with a broader conversation about who gets to sit at the table. Arnagiri says the lack of women in technical governance roles is both a pipeline issue and a matter of structural barriers.
“In many fintechs, governance is still seen as a ‘gatekeeper’ role rather than a ‘growth’ role,” she says. “This perception can limit the influence of women in those seats.” Increasing representation, she argues, requires more than hiring. “It requires a leadership culture that recognises technical governance as integral to business performance.”
When asked which fintech models are most exposed to tightening enforcement over the next five years, she points to businesses built on complexity without enough clarity around accountability. Cross-border operations with complex settlement arrangements, she says, will face the greatest pressure.
“The most resilient businesses will be those that can clearly articulate their role in the value chain, the regulatory basis on which they operate, and the governance supporting their tax and compliance approach.”
In other words, the fintech winners of the next decade will not be the ones who moved fastest. They will be the ones who built their houses on ground the government already said was theirs to stand on. Arnagiri has been telling them this for years. Now the regulators are proving her right.