Amandine Lobelle
COO at Paystack & The Stack Group
Amandine, you've worked across investment banking, development finance, fintech investing and now operations. What did each stage teach you that helps you today as a COO?
In hindsight, the journey looks quite logical, but it was never linear or particularly planned. I’ve never really been someone with a five-year plan and rather followed opportunities. I choose them based on whether I believe in the work and will learn and grow from it, and whether I’m excited by the people I’ll be working with.
Each stage taught me something different. Investment banking taught me attention to detail, a high bar for excellence, stamina under pressure, and strong financial fundamentals. Investing taught me how to understand different business models and revenue drivers and gave me much more empathy for founders. It reinforced the value of having strong technical builders at the heart of technology companies.
Operating has probably taught me the most about first-principles thinking. We are often solving problems we haven’t seen before, so you need strong views held loosely and the ability to constantly zoom in and out. As COO, I’m connecting dots across functions one minute and firefighting a very specific issue the next.
And finally, I’ve learned that hiring and culture are foundational for success as companies are built and sustained by people. One of the things we’re most proud of is hiring bar raisers and empowering them to do the best work of their career.
One of those opportunities you followed turned into a turning point for African tech. You were Head of Business Operations at Paystack when Stripe acquired it. Since you’ve had experience in investment banking, what do such deals actually look like from the inside and how do they change a local market?
The acquisition actually naturally continued the relationship between these companies. Stripe had led our Series A in 2018, and we were very aligned in terms of culture and mission. Stripe didn’t have an African presence and saw Paystack as the foundation of its long-term Africa strategy.
From the inside, it was incredibly hands-on. We ran the process ourselves, without an investment bank or external diligence consultants, and a decade earlier when I had started my career in M&A I never thought I would be running an acquisition process from the inside. It also happened during COVID, so the entire process was remote. There were essentially three or four of us on the Paystack side coordinating questions across legal, finance, compliance, tax, risk, treasury, technology and commercial diligence.
What was important afterwards was what didn’t change. Stripe understood that you can’t figure out African payments from San Francisco, so Paystack remained highly autonomous. We continued to own our product and expansion roadmaps, while benefiting from Stripe’s scale like merchant referrals, product collaboration, talent exchanges and global expertise. At the same time, being part of Stripe forced us to mature in many areas and match global standards.
Your point about understanding African payments from San-Francisco feels really important, especially since African fintech has been described for years as a market that is catching up. Based on your experience, what do outsiders most underestimate about it and where has it actually moved ahead?
I think this idea misses what is actually happening. Outsiders often underestimate the pace of innovation which is driven by necessity. African fintech companies are solving very specific problems for African consumers and businesses which is very far from simply replicating Western financial infrastructure.
For example, Kenya pioneered mobile money at a scale the rest of the world had never seen. In Nigeria, instant bank transfers dominate everyday payments and have grown enormously relative to cards. There is a challenge of a fragmented and highly localized ecosystem in Africa but it also creates enormous room for innovation. Many African markets may never need to follow the same evolution through cheques and credit cards that Western markets did.
The recent technologies like stablecoins and AI become even more important there.. Stablecoins, for example, can transform markets where cross-border payments still rely on legacy banking infrastructure and can take several days. By embracing these technologies, the pace of innovation can be even greater than what we’ve seen in the last few years.
AI payments seem to complicate this picture as they generally demand enormous investments. So, talking about AI in payments, how far are we from it being a working reality and what can the rest of the market do on this behalf?
Those payments, actually, are already working, and at Paystack we’re leaning heavily into AI both internally and in the products we build.
Internally, it is a great opportunity to boost productivity and automate workflow. Every payments company has processes like compliance monitoring, customer support, customer onboarding and reconciliations, and AI can improve their speed and quality.
Talking about the product, I think agentic commerce is particularly exciting. We are moving from asking AI to help you decide what to buy to actually passing it the ability to transact on your behalf. We’re actively experimenting with that area through our venture studio, TSG Labs, via products like Paystack Index. It is a catalogue of Paystack merchants that are aggregated via an MCP that can be used in Claude or ChatGPT.
Based on this experience, I want to advise companies without enormous R&D budgets not to treat AI as a separate innovation project. You can start with some real customer problems where it can bring measurable value today. Later, you will learn quickly and scale from there.
As agents get the ability to transact, it opens the question of what it transacts on. Visa and Mastercard are building their agentic rails around cards, while African payments run on transfers and mobile money. How will the continent's path into AI-driven payments differ in the end?
As I’ve already said, Africa’s path into agentic commerce doesn’t necessarily have to be card-led. Our first experiment in this area was Paystack Index, where we embedded Zap — our wallet built on bank transfers — into our AI-available list of merchants. The idea is that an agent would eventually discover a merchant and complete a transaction using the consumers’ preferred payment methods.
There is still significant room for AI innovation across every payment method, and I believe it can improve areas like fraud monitoring and chargebacks. To compare, cards have real structural advantages, like recurring payments or global standards, but transfers and mobile money reflect customer preferences across African markets. That’s why the real challenge is to build agentic payment infrastructure around the rails consumers already use.
Returning to your point that companies are built and sustained by people, how would you assess women's representation in African fintech? Does it look different from what you saw in the other regions you've worked in?
There is definitely progress, although there is always space to grow. African founders remain predominantly male, but we’re increasingly seeing women building and leading fintech companies across many areas, as well as taking senior roles across the ecosystem.
At Paystack, I’ve seen stronger female representation than in some of the environments I worked in earlier in my career. My investment banking analyst class, for example, was roughly 10% female. Today, women represent more than a half of our leadership team and around 40% of the broader company. That is meaningful progress, but I don’t think any of us should consider the work finished, because the ultimate goal should be to keep widening the pipeline of women who are building, investing in leading African technology companies.
