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Grey says over 3 million people have connected through its platform in the last three years. Now, it’s making a bigger bet with Paycheck, a new product for customers who receive their salaries through Grey. The goal? More than just receiving your salary. Paycheck is designed to offer extra benefits, including lifestyle perks, access to credit and higher interest on savings. It’s a move towards making salary payments a gateway to more financial opportunities.

“Where you live shouldn’t decide what you can do with your money.” At Betting on a Connected World, Grey CEO and co-founder Idorenyin Obong made the case for borderless money as essential infrastructure. Social media has connected people across borders. Financial services need to follow suit. If Africa wants to win in commerce, the rails moving money must be as serious as the rails moving goods. Whether you’re saving for a house or earning a salary, Grey wants to go wherever life takes you.

At What Happens When Fintech Becomes Banking?, one of the things Flutterwave CEO @TechProd_Arch spoke about was the company’s expansion into East Africa. Demand is high, and Flutterwave has secured the necessary licence to expand. The goal is to travel with its customers, using its reach, technology and business model to support them in new markets, and go above and beyond to meet their needs.

The African tech ecosystem is in the room.✨ We’re at #Moonshot2026 in Lagos, following the conversations shaping the future of fintech, business and technology across Africa. The big ideas, the bold takes, the conversations that matter. We’ll bring you the highlights as they happen. Let’s get into it!

So are we at that evolved state? Not answered yet. But the pieces are moving, and we will be following these developments closely, hoping they are adopted widely in Nigeria by all players. Let us know. Will you use contactless payments? What amount would you be comfortable with spending via this method.

What the announcements do not settle: which integrations are live, how transaction limits apply across cards, wallets and bank apps, whether merchants will accept at scale, and what they establish about Apple Pay availability in Nigeria.

Tokenisation speaks to part of the fraud concern: sensitive card details are replaced with tokens that can be restricted to a device or payment context, reducing exposure of real card data. It does not eliminate fraud, and it says nothing about limits or acceptance.

Then Interswitch. The switch says it is establishing the issuer connectivity, tokenisation and processing capabilities for GTBank, Wema, ProvidusUnity, Zenith and First Bank to offer tap to pay across Google Pay, Apple Pay and their own apps. techcabal.com/2026/10/27/int…

UBA first. The bank says its Visa and Mastercard users in Nigeria can now tap to pay with Google Pay, and describes itself as the first bank in the country to offer it. Google's support pages list Nigeria as supporting Google Wallet contactless payments. nairametrics.com/2026/10/27/…

One nuance that matters: a wallet being available in a country is not the same as your bank's cards working in it. Each bank must enable its cards for each wallet. That is exactly the layer this week's announcements are about.

Physical cards do this too, no phone needed: a card with the contactless indicator taps the terminal directly. Visa says millions of places worldwide accept it; in Australia, Canada, the UK and France over half of retailers do. UBA's cards went contactless in 2015.

Apple Pay is available in Egypt, Morocco and South Africa. While Google lists Wallet contactless support in South Africa, Morocco and Nigeria. Availability still depends on the device and a supported card.

First, what tap to pay is: hold a card, phone or watch near a compatible terminal and the payment goes through over a short-range NFC connection. Physical contactless cards have done this for years. Wallet apps put the card on your phone or watch.

Whenever contactless payments are discussed in Nigeria, industry practitioners reference the fraud risk and transaction limits attached to these as the reason why we do not have them yet. Will these new developments help address them?

In the last episode of @AfricaBuiltPod, we closed by wondering what it would take for Nigeria to get contactless payments in an evolved ready to market state. Well, this week brought two developments we are tracking in that space. A thread 🧵