An ATM in Scotland gave Mitchell Elegbe an idea. Interswitch became a Lagos payments company with its own card.
Founded in 2002, Interswitch started as a transaction switch and grew to include Quickteller, a retail payments platform, and Verve, a home-grown card scheme.
While working on a SWIFT implementation, Mitchell Elegbe used an ATM for the first time in Scotland and began to imagine similar electronic payment infrastructure for Nigeria. At his employer, Telnet, his boss approved a transaction switch. Most of the banks he sold to weren’t interested in the switching software, which pushed him to create Interswitch itself, with help from Accenture, and he became its chief executive.
Building the platform
Interswitch was founded in 2002 as a national transaction switching and processing company. It added Quickteller, a retail payments system linking merchants and billers to consumers, and Verve, a home-grown, EMV-certified payment card scheme. It is headquartered in Lagos.
Growing beyond Nigeria
- 2010: two-thirds of the company was sold to a consortium led by Helios Investment Partners.
- 2011: a 60 percent stake in Bankom in Uganda.
- 2013: an agreement for payment processing with Discover Financial Services.
- 2014: a majority shareholding in the East African payments provider Paynet Group.
- 2015: a 10 million dollar investment fund for African payments startups.
Interswitch is a reminder that infrastructure companies can start with a gap in the market: banks did not need to buy software, so the founder built the service.
