DNI Pay: The Nigerian fintech that wants to become the Zelle for Africa

In 2021, Octavia Securities set out to manage the flow of residents and visitors in Lagos’s booming estates with the DNI Security App. As remote work and urban migration fuelled demand for gated communities, the team built an app that essentially manages security, check-in, and check-out for estates. Yet every resident subscription fee passed through third-party gateways, chipping away at their margins. As transaction volumes climbed, those costs became impossible to ignore.

“We got curious, and we started looking at what it takes to actually build something that can just settle payments. We weren’t really thinking of being a fintech app. The idea was that we don’t want to rely on someone’s infrastructure anymore,” recalls Kenechukwu Uche, Co-founder & Chief Marketing Officer at DNI Pay.

“We spent months refactoring their back-end systems, first to eliminate dependencies and then to prove they could settle payments just as swiftly as any third party,” according to Israel Omotayo, who is CTO & Co-founder.  That experimentation revealed a larger opportunity. If their payment gateway could process estate fees, why not extend it to every Nigerian who needed to send money to family, pay school fees, or top up for a ride?

By 2024, DNI Pay was launched with the promise of fast and reliable local transfers.

A bet on everyday payments

From the outset, the team recognised that most fintech innovations in Nigeria primarily target cross-border remittances. But they focused on something much closer to home. “Local payments are still kind of broken,” he says. Every week, millions of Nigerians move small sums, ranging from ₦2,000 to ₦5,000, for school fees, lunch, transport, and numerous other everyday expenses. “Those daily transactions happen far more frequently than wire transfers, yet they often encounter hidden fees, confusing app navigations, and delayed payment confirmations,” Kene adds.

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DNI Pay set out to change that by owning the entire value chain and repackaging its estate-tech foundations into a streamlined payment platform. It would focus entirely on solving a simple yet widespread problem: moving money locally without hassle.

Trust, simplicity, and community-led growth

In a market crowded with feature-heavy apps, DNI Pay intentionally keeps things simple. The app focuses on four core actions: sending money, receiving money, topping up a wallet, and withdrawing funds. It promises instant confirmations and near-zero fees, helping users “send money successfully and confidently” before introducing any extras like recurring transfers or budgeting tools. “We plan to get it to zero cost in the next couple of years,” Kene says, noting that scale will help bring costs down even further.

Many fintech apps try to stand out by adding layers of shiny features, but Kene argues they often miss the point. 

“You send money, and then either the money goes through without confirmation or takes time to go through,” he explains. Speed and reliability, he believes, should be the top priority. “No user is stressed yet about all those extra features around recurring payments, or analytics or around beneficiary features. Those things are only nice to have,” he adds.

“We want to be the simplest fintech app out there for local payments for a start,” Kene says.

What gives DNI Pay a head start is the trust it has already built with users in residential estates. Rather than chase a completely new audience, the company began by offering payments to the same communities that already used its security service. “We already have estates using our security service. Most of those users are registered,” Kene says. “It’s easy to upsell and say: within this estate, we can help you settle your day-to-day payments.”

This ready-made audience not only speeds up adoption but also provides the team with consistent feedback. “We intend to have physical town hall meetings, and walk into maybe the biggest estate that has a large user base of people that use the service, and have genuine conversations with them to understand what do you like, how would you guys think about our payments, what would you want, what would you want to see on this app,” Kene shares.

These conversations serve two purposes: they surface real user pain points and create opportunities to test new features. DNI Pay often releases features to select estate cohorts first, then refines them before rolling them out fully.

“We want a viable business model before we bring in venture capital,” Kene says. For the next nine to twelve months, the focus will remain on fine-tuning operations and responding to what users actually need. “Until they ask, I don’t think you should be the one defining what your users will want,” he adds.

Looking ahead, DNI Pay plans to scale gradually, expanding through the estate networks it already serves. According to Founder & CEO Olayinka Olaoye, “We want people to recall this product as Zelle for Africa.” 

That means maintaining focus on seamless, low-cost peer-to-peer transfers and only expanding features when there’s clear demand. The goal is not to overwhelm users, but to solve everyday payment problems with precision and clarity.

DNI Pay is available on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.