There is a version of Nigeria’s fintech story that begins with app downloads and venture capital term sheets. This is not that version. It begins in a banking hall, with a young engineer standing in a queue, holding a tally number and waiting to withdraw his own money.

That engineer was Mitchell Elegbe of Interswitch in the early 2000s, three years into his career after a stint learning how payments worked in the UK. He had never worked in banking. He had never worked in payments. What he had was a queue, a tally number, and a growing conviction that Nigeria deserved better.

The idea that would become Interswitch began as a business case, and its first major test did not go well. At an early meeting at the House of Equity, Elegbe pitched a group of bank CEOs on the concept. One of them, he recalls, tore the business case apart on the spot. He returned to the drawing board and this time brought in Accenture, whose existing work with Nigerian banks meant it already understood what those banks were looking for.

The revised pitch landed. A few bank CEOs took meetings. Elegbe was invited to management retreats. The idea began to move.

Funding was the next obstacle.

There was no ecosystem of venture capitalists circling Nigerian startups the way there is today. Elegbe has said he did not even know the term “venture capital” at the time. Instead, there was a Bankers Committee and Central Bank of Nigeria scheme called SMEEIS, which required banks to set aside a share of their profits to invest in small and medium enterprises.

Based on his business plan, Elegbe needed ₦450 million. The scheme’s limits meant he ultimately secured ₦200 million, a little under half of what he had asked for.

The company’s own plan was to reach profitability within four years. According to Elegbe, it got there in one year and remained profitable for the 19 years that followed, after the company was founded in 2002.

That speed matters in understanding why Interswitch became more than a software project. In a market where electronic payments were still developing and bank adoption was uneven, the company had to prove not only that the rails could exist, but that customers and institutions would actually use them.

The infrastructure-first instinct that shaped Interswitch’s early strategy is, in Elegbe’s telling, close to a parable about roads. Build the infrastructure connecting Nigeria’s banks, the thinking went, and traffic will follow, the way a community builds roads before moving goods along them. But roads without vehicles move nothing.

Interswitch built the connections between banks, but transaction volume still was not there. That gap pushed the company to build products on top of the infrastructure it had already created, rather than infrastructure alone.

The clearest example is Verve, Interswitch’s domestic card scheme, and the logic behind it has become a case study in reading the market correctly.

Elegbe noticed that the number of bank accounts in Nigeria far exceeded the number of those accounts that actually had a card attached. He found that cost was the main reason. Banks considered traditional international cards such as Visa and Mastercard too expensive to issue broadly, so they remained limited to an elite slice of the customer base.

His reading of the opportunity was blunt. At the time, he estimated that less than 5% of Nigerians travelled abroad, which meant the case for an internationally enabled card was thin for the vast majority of the market. He built Verve instead: a card priced in local currency and designed specifically for a domestic economy, on the logic that the remaining 95% of the market was more than large enough to support a business.

By the time of this conversation, Elegbe said Nigeria’s total card count across the banking sector was roughly 65 million, with Verve holding close to 49% market share of that figure. That number is now over 120 million, and the trajectory described is that of a card scheme that grew from a bet on an underserved 95% of the population into the largest domestic card brand in the country’s banking sector.

Elegbe has also repeatedly corrected a common misconception about what Interswitch actually is. It is not a card company. Verve is a card scheme that runs on Interswitch’s infrastructure, alongside Mastercard and Visa, both of which also process transactions through Interswitch’s rails, with Visa having taken a direct investment stake in the company.

Elegbe has described this as a deliberate “live and let live” approach: build a highway that competitors are welcome to use on the same commercial terms as everyone else, because growing the ecosystem benefits the company more than trying to hoard the road.

None of this reads like the founding myth of a company built for a quick exit. Elegbe, when asked directly over the years about an Interswitch IPO, has consistently declined to give a straight answer. Instead, he frames the question around four issues he says matter more: whether Interswitch is making an impact, whether the ecosystem around it is growing sustainably, how it is dealing with the ever-present threat of cybercrime that comes with going electronic, and whether it is setting an example that attracts more people into the field.

His answer to all four, he says, is yes, and that valuations and any eventual exit for the private equity investors who hold a stake in the company are a matter of time rather than a plan on a whiteboard.

It is a different register from most fintech founding stories being told in Nigeria today, less about disruption and more about a young engineer who stood in a bank queue once, decided the country deserved better, and then spent much of the next two decades building the roads.

Read also: Interswitch returns to N23bn profit as Nigeria drives over 90% of revenue

Watch the full video below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Z1v2vuyYes\u0026list=PLUqsFygfaTt4iIXXR9vuJlQixCutevnB3\u0026index=3\u0026t=585s