Sava is a licensed South African banking-as-a-service infrastructure provider, enabling fintechs and non-banks to build financial products.
That wasn’t the original plan.
Sava began as a spend management product and in trying to build it, the team ended up building the entire banking stack behind it. Three years in, that infrastructure became the product.
We caught up with Kolawole Olajide, Founder of Sava, to learn more about their journey, what this investment enables, and what they’re focused on next.
What has been the most exciting moment on your journey with Sava so far?
The most exciting moment was realising we'd accidentally built something far more valuable than a spend management product. To launch our own spend management product properly, we had no choice but to build everything from scratch; from the banking infrastructure, compliance frameworks, sponsor bank integrations, essentially the entire banking stack. Three years in, we looked up and realised the infrastructure we'd built to solve our own problem was actually a scarce asset.
We held the regulatory licences (GN5, FSP, NCR), we'd built production-grade issuing and payment infrastructure in-house, and we had working relationships with sponsor banks and Mastercard.
That combination didn't exist in South Africa as a platform others could easily build on. So we pivoted, from being solely a spend management provider competing for margin to becoming the BaaS infrastructure layer that every fintech and non-bank needs but can't build themselves. Today some of the biggest fintechs in Africa are building on our rails.
How does this investment help Sava take its next big step?
This investment lets us add product features and capabilities to our BaaS platform. We've built the infrastructure, now it's about expanding what clients can do with it. We recently launched Google Pay and Apple Pay goes live in the coming weeks, giving clients the payment features their users expect. The investment also lets us expand our compliance, fraud and engineering teams to support growing transaction volumes as clients scale.
For us it's about building the operational depth to move faster: onboarding clients quicker, launching features that keep them competitive, and maintaining the speed and oversight they need as they push more volume through our rails.
What are you focusing on at Sava in the coming months as you continue to grow?
The immediate focus is getting 2 of our tier 1 clients to go-live. They're in advanced integration now, and successful go-lives prove we can support enterprise-grade clients at scale. Alongside that, we're targeting two more tier 1 enterprise clients to build momentum and demonstrate we're becoming the default embedded banking choice for serious players.
Beyond client count, we're focused on transaction volume growth as the real metric. More volume through our rails means stickier relationships and better unit economics.
On product, it's about maintaining feature parity while building infrastructure that becomes more valuable the deeper clients integrate. The goal is creating a platform that clients naturally want to expand on, building more products and use cases on our rails as their own businesses grow.
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