Across Africa, the payments infrastructure that underpins most global airline retailing was not built for the markets it is supposed to serve. Card penetration varies sharply by country. Mobile money dominates in East Africa. Bank transfer is the consumer default for high-ticket purchases across much of West Africa. And the systems that airlines have historically deployed, designed around card networks built for Western markets, have routinely left a significant share of potential passengers unable to complete a booking. Nigeria is where that problem is being solved most visibly, and a company called OnePipe is doing the solving.
OnePipe now powers 9 of Nigeria’s 14 licensed domestic airlines. The story of how it got there is really a story about what happens when you build for the market in front of you rather than the market someone else assumed existed.
Account-to-account bank transfer is not a niche preference in Nigeria. It is the dominant payment behaviour for high-ticket purchases. Estimates put A2A transactions via Nigeria’s NIBSS NIP infrastructure at around 76% of all high-value e-commerce activity in the country. For airlines, that means the majority of potential passengers are not reaching for a card when they go to buy a ticket. They are reaching for their banking app.
For years, that reality was poorly served by the payments stacks that Nigerian airlines were deploying. The card networks that underpin most global airline booking infrastructure were designed for markets where card penetration is high, chargebacks are manageable, and consumer payment behaviour broadly resembles the Western default. Nigeria is none of those things. Airlines that launched with card-first payment architecture were not just experiencing friction. They were structurally inaccessible to a large share of their own potential market from the moment they went live.
OnePipe was built around a different premise. The company, founded by Ope Adeoye and backed by Canaan Partners, Tribe Capital, and Techstars, built its infrastructure around account-based payments from the start. The results, as carriers have adopted it, have been immediate and measurable. One airline saw customers choose bank transfer over card at an 8-to-1 ratio within three hours of activation. That is not a marginal shift in payment preference. It is a signal about how mismatched the legacy infrastructure was with actual consumer behaviour.
The numbers at the market level reflect that. OnePipe processed $250 million in transaction value across nearly one million tickets in 2025. It now serves the majority of Nigeria’s licensed domestic airline market. Binani Air, which selected OnePipe at launch, joins NG Eagle and Rano Air as carriers that made the same choice from day one, reflecting a hard lesson the sector has absorbed: the payments decision is not an operational detail. It is a commercial one.
There are other features worth noting. OnePipe runs multi-bank routing that sustains 99.99% uptime if any single bank connection fails. It eliminates chargeback risk, which in a market like Nigeria is a meaningful protection for airlines operating on already thin margins. It also provides dedicated aviation payments support, which matters in a sector where settlement timing and reconciliation complexity can become operational liabilities quickly.
The model is not without its challenges. Nigeria’s A2A infrastructure is relatively mature by African standards, built on a single dominant instant payment rail in NIBSS NIP. Other markets are more fragmented. East Africa’s mobile money ecosystem, where M-Pesa and similar platforms carry the bulk of consumer transactions, operates on a different technical and commercial logic. Regulatory environments for non-card payment acceptance vary significantly across the continent, and integration complexity for airlines accustomed to legacy PSS and GDS-linked payment flows is not trivial. Whether the account-based approach that works in Lagos translates directly to Nairobi, Accra, or Dakar is a genuinely open question.
What OnePipe has demonstrated in Nigeria is still significant. Building to the local financial architecture rather than around it produces better commercial outcomes for airlines. This is the argument that has been developing in African distribution for several years. Mobile money integration, local payment rail connectivity, and account-based infrastructure are not concessions to market immaturity. They are the technically correct response to where consumers actually are.
The question worth watching now is whether the model scales beyond Nigeria. OnePipe has operating entities in Nigeria, the United Kingdom, and Kenya. Nigeria remains the core proof point. But the same structural mismatch between global card infrastructure and African consumer payment behaviour exists across the continent. The carriers that have learned the lesson in Nigeria are not the last ones who will need to learn it. And the payments companies that understand African financial rails, rather than simply adapting Western ones, may end up owning a larger share of how air travel is sold on this continent than anyone in traditional airline distribution is currently anticipating.
Travel Distribution News covers airline distribution, travel payments, and the technology reshaping how travel is sold across Africa and global markets.
