When Yinka Arouko left Paystack to launch Bujeti in 2021 alongside co-founder and COO Samy Chiba, the pitch was straightforward: give African businesses a better way to handle spending. More than a thousand teams now use the platform for spend management, payments, payroll and tax management — and that growth has pushed the company well past its original identity.
Bujeti is no longer simply competing to be the company that issues business cards. It is positioning itself as the system through which businesses understand and control their money.
Cross-Border Payments, Business-Only
The company has now enabled cross-border payments for its users, but with a deliberate twist: while most fintechs chase consumer remittances, Bujeti has restricted itself to businesses.
“Consumer cross-border is the most contested market on this continent. There are good companies in it, the margins are thin, and the competition eventually becomes a question of who has the cheapest float. We have no edge there and no appetite for it,” Arouko said.
Business cross-border payments, he argues, operate on entirely different logic. Where a consumer is often the sole decision-maker when sending money, a business must navigate approvals, currency management and record-keeping at every step.
“For a person, cross-border payment is a transaction. For a business, it is a record that happens to involve money moving,” he added.
A business payment isn’t merely about moving money from point A to point B. Who approved it, which budget it came from, what currency was used, what tax applies, which vendor received it and how it appears in the company’s books — all of that matters.
As more African businesses operate across multiple countries, that complexity only grows. Bujeti already supports businesses in several African markets and is building around the principle that companies shouldn’t need a different financial system every time they enter a new market.
With fintechs, banks and organisations like PAPSS working to make cross-border payments smoother, Arouko contends that being the ledger will become even more valuable.
Baking AI Into Business Finances
Having built systems that help businesses manage money, Bujeti is now deploying artificial intelligence to deliver more value. The goal, Arouko says, is to move from helping a business structure its accounts to helping it understand what those structures mean. The answer: four AI specialists working alongside businesses.
Fetch pulls documents from email and storage, extracting the data. Chaser runs collections across email, SMS and WhatsApp — and can even negotiate payment plans for customers who can’t settle in full. Watchdog scans transactions, vendors and contracts daily to raise alerts. And Concierge answers questions while drawing on its understanding of a business’s processes and policies.
This is where Bujeti’s ambition comes into focus. A typical small business may lack a CFO, financial controller, tax specialist, collections officer and procurement team. Instead, one person often handles most of these roles — armed with a spreadsheet, WhatsApp, a bank portal and a great deal of institutional knowledge. Bujeti is essentially asking whether software can fill some of those gaps.
“In Nigeria, small businesses operate in an environment where financial visibility and cash-flow discipline can determine whether a business survives. For businesses that contribute a significant share of the economy, money that you cannot track, control or account for is not an inconvenience. It is an existential risk,” Arouko said.
He frames this evolution as a natural progression of Africa’s business landscape. Where the first and second decades focused on consumer payments and business payments respectively, the third, he says, will focus on intelligence.
Other African fintechs appear to share that view. Earlier this year, Paystack launched Paystack Index, an AI agent that lets users complete everyday transactions like buying airtime or sending money. Xara is another fintech offering AI that enables users to send money, track spending or pay bills within WhatsApp.
But there’s a key distinction between using AI to execute a transaction and using AI to understand a business. Bujeti is betting on the latter.
