Africa’s next great technology company may not necessarily emerge from a young startup founded in a garage or a small technology hub. It could already exist within one of the continent’s banks, telecommunications companies, financial institutions or large enterprises, waiting to be identified, structured and given the freedom to grow.
This is the central argument advanced by Olayinka Oni, technology and business leader and Executive Director at Sterling Financial Holding Company, during an episode of the Tech Economy Podcast hosted by Bukky Amosun.
Oni, who has more than two decades of experience spanning Microsoft Nigeria, Accenture and Sterling Bank, argued that Africa’s established enterprises are sitting on significant technology capabilities that could potentially evolve into independent and highly valuable businesses.
His position, however, is not an argument against Africa’s startup ecosystem. Rather, he believes the two models are complementary. “Africa definitely needs a thriving startup ecosystem,” Oni explained, stressing that the opportunity lies in recognising that established enterprises may also possess capabilities capable of producing businesses with the scale and success associated with leading technology startups.
According to him, many enterprise technologies begin with a straightforward objective: solving an internal problem. An organisation identifies a challenge, commissions a solution and gradually develops the technology and capabilities required to address it. Over time, the solution can become institutionalised, resilient, reliable and scalable.
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The opportunity emerges when another organisation encounters the same problem. At that point, Oni believes enterprises should begin asking a different question: can the solution be adapted to serve a much larger market?
That transition, he explained, involves more than technology. It requires the organisation to reconsider its intellectual property, product structure, governance and operating model so that an internally developed capability can potentially become a business serving multiple customers.
Oni drew from his experience co-creating a core banking offering to illustrate the distinction. The fundamental question was not whether Africans could build world-class banking technology. Rather, it was whether a technology developed within an institution could be transformed into an enduring commercial product capable of solving problems for other organisations.
“That’s when I found that it’s beyond building technology. It’s about building businesses,” he said.
Building a technology business, he noted, introduces requirements that may not exist when a solution is used exclusively inside its parent organisation. These include product management, sales, customer support, regulatory and compliance capabilities, account management and a clear commercial roadmap.
For Oni, this is where many potentially valuable enterprise technologies become trapped.
He argued that organisations often approach technology initiatives as projects with defined beginnings and endings. Once the project has been completed successfully, the organisation celebrates the achievement and moves on. But, he suggested, some of the greatest value creation may begin after the project has been completed.
“The real value creation happens after you’ve clapped, you’ve popped champagne about the success of the project,” he said, arguing that enterprises need to look beyond project completion and examine whether the capability they have created could become something much bigger.
One of the biggest obstacles is the very structure that makes large organisations successful. Enterprises are designed to protect shareholder value, manage risk and prevent failures. In highly regulated industries such as banking, healthcare and aviation, controls, governance and accountability are essential.
The problem arises when those same structures are applied without modification to emerging businesses operating in conditions of uncertainty.
Oni argued that innovation does not mean abandoning governance. Instead, organisations need governance structures appropriate to the maturity and stage of the innovation. A mature, regulated business may require one level of control, while an experimental technology venture requires another.
He suggested that enterprises should create protected spaces for future bets, potentially through innovation pools, partnerships, co-creation arrangements, venture capital structures or other mechanisms that prevent emerging businesses from being suffocated by the governance framework of the core business.
The objective, he explained, is to protect the core while allowing new opportunities to develop independently.
Not every internal technology should become a standalone business. Oni believes enterprises need to look for clear signals that an internal capability has the potential to operate beyond its original environment.
One of the strongest indicators is market evidence. “If this really is something that somebody is willing to pay for and is also able to solve somebody else’s problem,” he said, the organisation should begin considering whether the technology has reached the point where it can leave the enterprise.
Other considerations include whether additional capital will be required, whether the opportunity still aligns with the parent company’s strategy and whether the existing operational and governance structure is capable of supporting the business.
The answer could take several forms. An enterprise might retain the technology, establish a partnership, license the intellectual property, share the IP with another organisation in exchange for royalties or eventually spin the business off entirely.
There is no universal model, Oni argued. The appropriate structure depends on the market, regulation, capital requirements and strategic realities surrounding the technology.
The rapid development of artificial intelligence could make the opportunity even more significant. But Oni does not believe AI fundamentally changes the enterprise advantage. Instead, he sees AI primarily as an economic advantage that accelerates experimentation and innovation.
Technologies that once required years to develop can increasingly be tested and iterated in a fraction of the time. But faster technology development does not automatically create successful businesses.
“Anyone can build,” Oni argued. “But anyone cannot necessarily create a business.”
For him, the critical competitive advantage will therefore shift towards commercialisation: identifying genuine market needs, developing viable products, establishing the right operating structures and creating businesses capable of scaling.
The conversation also examined why Africa has produced relatively few billion-dollar technology companies compared with some other regions.
Oni identified capital as one important challenge, particularly the availability of sufficient funding to support businesses through their scaling stages. But he placed even greater emphasis on governance.
He strongly rejected the idea that innovation should operate without governance, arguing instead that governance must evolve with the innovation.
According to him, companies that receive substantial investment but fail to demonstrate responsible stewardship of capital can quickly lose the confidence of investors. Weak governance, poor accountability and ineffective capital management can therefore become significant barriers to attracting further investment.
Oni also challenged the idea that Africa’s primary technology problem is a shortage of talent. While acknowledging that specific skills, education systems and curricula require improvement, he maintained that Africa already possesses significant technological talent.
The bigger issue, in his view, may be the tendency to focus on familiar and relatively easy-to-understand problems. He argued that if every entrepreneur wants to build another payments or lending business, the continent risks overlooking the enormous range of less obvious problems that could generate much larger opportunities.
Some of the businesses capable of becoming extremely valuable, he suggested, may be solving what he described as mundane or “unsexy” problems.
The conversation also turned to Nigeria’s evolving data localisation requirements and the implications for financial technology companies ahead of January 2027.
Oni placed the debate within a broader economic and geopolitical context. He noted that economies increasingly need to consider where value creation and employment occur, particularly as more economic activity becomes service-oriented.
If critical data infrastructure and hosting capabilities are located outside Nigeria, a significant portion of the associated economic value and employment may also be created elsewhere.
There is, therefore, a potential economic argument for developing stronger domestic data infrastructure.
Oni also pointed to geopolitical risks. In an increasingly protectionist global environment, countries need to consider the consequences of depending heavily on external infrastructure and foreign jurisdictions for critical systems.
He suggested that issues ranging from international sanctions to access to financial infrastructure demonstrate why countries need to think seriously about digital sovereignty and resilience.
At the same time, he argued that local data infrastructure could create new opportunities for investment and employment. Nigeria is already seeing increased investment around data centres, and greater localisation could accelerate that development.
There could also be benefits for customers, including potentially improved transaction experiences when data and digital services do not have to travel thousands of kilometres before being processed.
For Oni, the biggest responsibility ultimately rests with the leadership of large African enterprises.
CEOs and boards need to look inward and ask whether valuable technology capabilities already exist within their organisations.
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“Almost any business can become a technology company anyway,” he said, distinguishing that possibility from the much more difficult task of deliberately creating technology businesses.
The first step, therefore, is discovery. Enterprises need to identify the capabilities they have built, determine whether there is genuine external market demand and assess how large the opportunity could become.
Where the evidence is strong, leadership must then be willing to create the structures necessary for the business to grow.
For African enterprises, this could represent a powerful route towards diversification. Instead of viewing technology exclusively as an internal enabler of the existing business, organisations could begin treating certain technology capabilities as potential new revenue engines.
The next African technology giant, Oni’s argument suggests, may not need to be invented from scratch. It may already have been built.
The real challenge is recognising it, protecting it, giving it the right governance and commercial structure, and knowing when to allow it to leave the nest.
As Africa continues its search for globally significant technology companies, the opportunity may therefore lie not only in creating new startups, but also in unlocking the hidden technology businesses already developing inside the continent’s largest institutions.
