Condia’s The Borderless Experience draws leaders on Africa’s growth and payments gap

Condia’s inaugural The Borderless Experience brought together senior voices from McKinsey and Company, Interswitch, Zest Payments, and other ecosystem leaders on August 21, 2026, in a conference built around a single question facing African businesses as they scale past their home markets.

The event was convened by Benjamin Dada, founder of Condia, and drew founders, bankers, and policy figures into a day of conversation about what it actually takes to grow across borders rather than simply reach them.

Ricky Asemota, a partner at McKinsey and Company, opened proceedings with a keynote arguing that the real test facing fast-growing companies is not whether they can generate new ideas but whether they can hold onto the ones they already have. “The capability that is proportionately valuable is not the ability to create new ideas, it’s going to be the ability to absorb them,” she told the room, describing a pattern she has observed across client work in Africa and the Gulf region, where growth strategies frequently outpace the internal systems meant to sustain them.

That theme carried into a fireside conversation between Akeem Lawal, Divisional Chief Executive Officer of Interswitch’s Payment Processing and Switching business, and Kemi Manuel, CEO of Zest Payments.

Lawal used the session to disclose a figure that drew immediate attention from the audience, stating that roughly $100 billion in cross-border payments moved out of Nigeria in the past year through channels with no licence attached to any of it. “The problem today that I see, and that Interswitch is trying to solve, is that we now need to take the sophistication we have created in Nigeria and expand it outside of Nigeria,” Lawal said, framing the figure as evidence of unmet demand rather than a cautionary statistic.

Manuel located the barrier to closing that gap in regulation rather than technology. “The biggest challenge I think we have in Africa is regulation, and it’s fragmented,” she said, pointing to the different licencing requirements a single fintech model can face from one African market to the next and to early discussions among regulators about a shared licence that could eventually operate across several countries at once.

Dada said the conference grew out of gaps he kept encountering in his own reporting on African startups. “I realised I didn’t want to build a startup. I wanted to build a product that solves the problem,” Dada said. “A lot of people have talked to me about building a startup but can’t seem to find licences or banking partners, who to hire, or answers to some of the real-world challenges. Those are the conversations we want to create room for.”

The Borderless Experience is positioned as the first in a series of Condia gatherings aimed at giving founders and operators direct access to the people building the financial infrastructure they depend on, rather than conference programming built around pitch competitions or general networking.

Organisers said future editions will continue to pair global perspective, through speakers like Asemota, with the operational detail that founders raised as most useful, of the kind Lawal and Manuel offered on regulation, licencing and cross-border payment infrastructure.