Branch is not acting alone. Across African fintech, profitable or not, companies are cutting weight. Flutterwave axed roughly half its Kenya and South Africa headcount in mid-2025. Twiga Foods and Metro Africa Xpress followed.
The common thread: investors want returns, not growth slides.
Branch made its reputation by lending to people that banks ignored. Its underwriting model reads phone behaviour instead of credit files, practical in markets where most adults have never been formally scored. Since launching in 2015, Branch has put more than $1.8 billion in loans into the hands of over 13 million customers across Kenya, Tanzania, Nigeria, and India. The 2022 purchase of a majority stake in Kenya’s Century Microfinance Bank gave Branch a deposit-taking licence and the infrastructure to operate more like a full bank.
The business ran. Turns out a working business model doesn’t exempt you from a cost-cutting exercise.
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What This Means for Nigeria’s Fintech Talent Market
For Nigerian workers at Branch, it wasn’t a distant headline. These were engineers, credit analysts, and customer support staff. They built something that worked. Then they got severance notices.
Nigeria’s fintech sector already has displaced talent from earlier rounds of cuts. When a company with a live banking licence, a real customer base, and genuine profit still finds reasons to shrink its teams, the message to workers is plain: job security doesn’t track with company success.
That’s a specific problem for Lagos. Unlike markets where laid-off engineers find roles within weeks, the Nigerian fintech labour pool is smaller. Candidates circulate through a short list of employers, including Carbon, FairMoney, Tala, and a handful of others. Analysts tracking the sector note that when multiple companies tighten at the same time, the math turns harsh fast.
Branch’s Nigerian operation competes in a market where digital lending is established, but trust is fragile. High interest rates on mobile loans are a persistent criticism aimed at Branch, and peers already put users on edge. Fewer staff means fewer people handling disputes, slower product iteration, and gaps in local market knowledge that take years to build.
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The Profitability Paradox Is the Real Story
There is a phrase circulating among African startup operators right now: “profitable but vulnerable.” Branch fits it.
Earning $30 million globally while cutting staff in your core African markets suggests the company is optimising for investor confidence rather than just financial health. Those are different things.
Fintech revenues across the Middle East and Africa grew 21% in 2024. The sector’s projected CAGR through 2028 sits at 32%. The opportunity isn’t shrinking. What’s shrinking is tolerance for headcount that doesn’t map cleanly to a unit economics spreadsheet.
Branch likely believes a leaner structure lets it compete more aggressively on price, potentially offering lower interest rates or entering segments it has ignored. That’s the optimistic read.
What actually leaves with every severance package is harder to rebuild: credit intuition, market knowledge, and years of hyperlocal product sense. None of that shows up in an efficiency ratio.
Branch hasn’t explained the trade-off publicly. The workers who lost their jobs already know one side of it. The customers and what they get or don’t get from a leaner Branch will know the other.
