How one startup is solving the dreaded financial operations crisis that leads to missing funds and failed businesses

What do you think of when you hear “instant payments”?

As a recipient, you probably think of an instant credit alert or an increased account balance. But fintech professionals know to ask whether the payment “settles” instantaneously alongside value transfer. This distinction between “instant value” (for end customers) and “instant settlement” (for financial institutions) is crucial.

Take Nigeria, for instance. Fund transfers via NIBSS Instant Payment (NIP) are described as instant, but settlement between institutions happens in batches at least four times daily. The core problem is that banks’ settlement and reconciliation officers must manually reconcile each transaction after converting settlement files from NIBSS to usable formats. “Starting from GTBank, I saw a lot of similarities,” says Cleopatra Douglas, Software Engineer and CEO/Co-founder, Recital Finance. She recalls the recurring problems she encountered in every role.

The necessity of this manual, spreadsheet-driven process is felt everywhere, from telcos processing millions of low-value transactions to public sector agencies using proprietary government portals. As former Flutterwave COO and Co-founder of Recital Finance, Bode Abifarin, put it, “Payments evolve quickly, but the systems responsible for validating them do not. Reconciliation remains manual. Visibility breaks at scale. Decisions are made on partial financial truth. Risk accumulates quietly”.

The hidden complexity behind every payment

For institutions such as Banks, PSPs, Switches, fintechs, and other infrastructure providers, this problem is more acute. Slow reconciliation can lead to loss of money, jobs, or outright demise of the business. Institutional guardrails like SLA around chargebacks, a form of dispute that could be better managed with clearer reconciliation and case management processes, have killed startups.

When merchants accept multiple payment methods (cards, mobile money, USSD, wallets) and sell internationally, the complexity scales geometrically as the number of currencies and gateways increases. 

These systems don’t behave the same way, generating non-standard outputs like CSVs, PDFs, and varied API conventions.

The operational burden grows heavier as digital rails multiply across Africa. When numbers do not reconcile, a complex dispute process involving “multi-departmental engagement, paper trails, and countless follow-ups” is required. This means finance teams spend their time chasing gaps rather than running the business, resulting in slower growth and higher operational overhead.

Companies like Codat in the UK have tackled similar, adjacent challenges. Recital Finance applies the same philosophy, but with a different focus, to address the daily operational chaos faced by fintechs, banks, telcos, public agencies, e-commerce platforms, and fast-growing startups.

How Recital brings clarity to financial operations chaos

Recital is building what Co-founder Bobola Ojo-Ami describes as a control centre for finance, operations, and engineering teams. The platform integrates directly into the financial stack by connecting to banks, PSPs, and internal systems, then pulling data from any source regardless of format.

The challenge is standardisation: two financial institutions can record the same transaction differently. Recital handles this by cleaning and restructuring the data for comparison, then applying matching rules. The platform handles refunds, disputes, chargebacks, and partial settlements whilst highlighting mismatches and showing exactly where transactions fall out of line.

With integrations to over 5,000 financial touchpoints globally, Recital connects to major African processors such as Interswitch, Flutterwave, and NIBSS, as Well as Card schemes (Visa, Mastercard, AfriGo), plus global players like Stripe and Adyen. That gives businesses structured oversight across fintechs and banks, telcos, public agencies, e-commerce platforms, and fast-growing startups.

Recital Finance has backing from Launch Africa and is already working with businesses across e-commerce, telecoms, and the public sector. With founders Cleopatra Douglas, former Goldman Sachs, Flutterwave and GTBank Software Engineer; and Bode Abifarin, founder of Strata Advisory (the fintech operations firm behind the financial reconciliation tool, Crunch), former COO of Flutterwave, Associate Director at KPMG and Bobola Ojo-Ami, former Chief Commercial Lead & Head of Global marketing, at Loans2Go and Ultahost.

Together, they are not just building a reconciliation tool but creating the operational backbone that allows African businesses to scale without being held back by spreadsheets and manual processes. Instant payments have been solved, but clarity on those payments hasn’t. That’s the gap Recital is closing.

Last updated: April 20, 2026