From 'Senrere' to Settlement: Why Muva’s New IMTO License Matters to Builders

Try paying for an AWS bill on a random Tuesday morning from a hot, stuffy co-working space in Gbagada, and you will quickly realize that our financial system is held together by duct tape, hope, and desperate Slack messages to OTC traders.

For those of us building products in Nigeria, cross-border payments are the ultimate boss level. We have all been there—trying to hook up a simple international payment gateway only to get hit with transaction failures, compliance roadblocks, or ridiculous exchange rate spreads that scream "Sapa is coming."

So, when I saw the news that Muva Networks, founded by Akitoye “Ajebutter22” Balogun, bagged an official International Money Transfer Operator (IMTO) license from the Central Bank of Nigeria, my developer brain immediately went to the tech and the sheer effort behind this.

The Hidden Plumbing of Fintech

A lot of people know Ajebutter from his music—smooth rap verses and hit tracks that defined our university days. But in our tech circles, what he’s doing with Muva is a masterclass in building infrastructure.

Muva did not start out by building another shiny retail app with pretty gradients and a promise to help you "save in dollars." They started by doing the heavy, unglamorous lifting: treasury rebalancing and liquidity provision for other fintechs. They were the unseen engine room doing high-volume OTC trades.

If you have ever tried to write code that handles multi-currency ledger systems or manages real-time liquidity across different jurisdictions, you know how quickly it becomes a nightmare. If the liquidity isn't there, your beautifully designed app is just an expensive database of failed transactions. Muva processed over $200 million in 2025. That is not just a vanity metric; that is a massive volume of actual API calls, settlement reconciliations, and complex ledger balancing.

Why We Need More Licenses and Fewer Wrappers

We currently have a situation in Nigeria where there are more IMTOs than local payment providers. Over 100 of them. On paper, that sounds crowded. But as a developer, I see it differently.

For the longest time, the ecosystem has been plagued by what I call "wrapper fatigue." Too many startups are just wrapping the same two or three legacy APIs and calling it a new fintech product. When the underlying API sneezes, everyone catches a cold.

By securing both the local CBN IMTO license and Canada's FINTRAC registration, Muva is bypass-routing the middlemen. The FINTRAC piece lets them hook into global multi-currency rails, while the IMTO license allows them to legally drop those funds straight into Nigerian bank accounts without looking over their shoulders.

This means faster settlements, fewer hops along the payment chain, and hopefully, API endpoints that don't throw random 500 errors when a merchant in Onitsha is trying to pay their supplier in Guangzhou.

The Musician-to-Founder Pipeline is Real

It is wild seeing the crossover between the creative industry and hard tech. We have Mr Eazi co-founding Pawapay, and now Ajebutter scaling Muva across nine African countries, including places like Cameroon, Guinea, and Mozambique.

Honestly, it makes sense. To survive the music hustle in Nigeria, you need a ridiculous amount of grit, distribution savvy, and the ability to negotiate with some very tough characters. Transfer those skills to the fintech space, add a Master’s degree in Project Management and a stint at Cisco, and you get a founder who knows how to navigate the absolute chaos of African regulatory environments.

At the end of the day, I don't care if the founder of my payment gateway is a rapper or an academic. I just want their APIs to return a 200 OK status when my users hit the checkout button.

If Muva's new license means we get more stable rails to build on, then I’m entirely here for it. Time to close my tabs, get back to my VS Code terminal, and see how we can leverage these new rails for our next deployment. No gree for anybody, we keep building.