Editor’s note: African-Startups is a sister publication of EU-Startups, bringing trusted coverage of startups, venture capital, and innovation across Africa.
Flutterwave, Africa’s payments infrastructure giant, has announced a collaboration with Xara, the AI-powered banking assistant built by Xava Technologies, to power the latter’s WhatsApp-based payment solution. The partnership comes just months after the Nigerian-founded FinTech secured strategic backing from blockchain firm Ripple and Circle Ventures.
Launched in June 2025, Xara turns WhatsApp into a personal banker for Nigerians. For millions of Nigerians, banking often means adapting to complex apps and unreliable connectivity. Xara solves this by meeting Nigerians where they spend most of their time: WhatsApp. Its AI-powered WhatsApp banking agent offers a low-friction interface that functions even on low-end devices and weak networks.
Using Xara on WhatsApp, Nigerian users and businesses can send money, pay bills, schedule payments, manage transaction history, and carry out more complex operations, including bulk transfers, product cataloguing, and a business dashboard for tracking growth. The platform supports interaction via text, images, or voice notes in English, Pidgin, Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo, a design choice aimed at making financial services accessible to underserved populations.
However, as Xara scaled, it ran into an infrastructure bottleneck, often relying on a different provider for nearly every function — wallets from one partner, bills and airtime from another, transfers from elsewhere — meaning every new service required a fresh integration. This fragmentation created reliability concerns on a platform where instantaneous responses were second nature for its users.
To solve this infrastructure challenge, Xara is collaborating with Flutterwave by consolidating Xara’s payment operations into a single integration. Xara customers can now securely access their Flutterwave Microfinance Bank (MFB) accounts directly within WhatsApp, with Flutterwave providing what it describes as the banking engine behind the scenes.
The arrangement covers all of Xara’s payment operations in Nigeria, giving the startup access to card, bank transfer, and USSD payment methods through a single API. Flutterwave says the collaboration combines Xara’s robust feature suite with Flutterwave’s enterprise-grade infrastructure to deliver exceptional value to the roughly 55,000 users and businesses currently on Xara’s platform.
Through its collaboration with Xara, Flutterwave is now setting itself up to help other companies whose products have outgrown their infrastructure. The Nigerian FinTech is positioning itself to help companies looking to scale conversational and embedded finance partnerships across Nigeria and beyond.
