5 Critical Questions Every Fintech CTO Should Ask Before Choosing a Payment Partner
May 19, 2025
As a fintech CTO, few decisions will impact your company's trajectory as profoundly as your choice of payment infrastructure partner. It's the foundation everything else in your product sits on—yet many technical leaders rush this decision, focusing on immediate needs rather than long-term implications.
I've seen this scenario play out dozens of times across African fintech startups. A company chooses a payment partner based on a slick demo and compelling pricing, only to find themselves re-platforming 12-18 months later when they hit unexpected limitations—right when they should be focusing on growth instead of infrastructure headaches.
The financial and opportunity costs of choosing the wrong payment partner can be devastating. One Nigeria-based lending platform estimated that their mid-scaling platform migration cost them over $200,000 in direct expenses and delayed their market expansion by seven months.
So, how do you avoid this costly mistake? Based on conversations with successful fintech CTOs across the continent, here are the five questions that separate those who choose wisely from those who end up with painful regrets.
1. "What happens at 100x our current volume?"
Why This Question Matters
Most payment partners can handle your initial transaction volumes without breaking a sweat. The real test comes when your monthly transactions jump from hundreds to tens of thousands—or more.
"We chose our first payment provider based on their ability to handle our MVP needs," explains the CTO of a South African investment platform. "Six months later, when we grew 40x following a successful funding round, we discovered their architecture couldn't scale without significant modifications to our integration. We essentially had to rebuild our entire payment flow during our highest growth period."
How to Evaluate the Answer
Look for these specific details in their response:
Architectural specifics: They should explain their scaling architecture in technical terms—load balancing, database sharding, horizontal scaling capabilities—not marketing speak.
Largest customer volume: Ask about their biggest customers' transaction volumes and how their system performs at those levels.
Performance degradation points: Every system has limits. Good partners will be transparent about theirs and how they manage them.
Rate limiting policies: Understand any API call limits that might affect you at scale.
Cost scaling: How will pricing change as you grow? Are there volume discounts or breakpoints?
Red Flags to Watch For
Be wary if you hear responses like:
"We can handle any volume you throw at us"
Vague references to "cloud scaling" without specifics
Inability to share performance metrics at scale
Unwillingness to connect you with larger customers
A technical partner confident in their scaling capabilities will offer specific numbers, explain their architecture limitations honestly, and connect you with reference customers operating at your target scale.
2. "How deep is your local market optimization?"
Why This Question Matters
Global payment providers often treat African payment methods as afterthoughts—bolt-on features rather than core capabilities. This approach leads to suboptimal integration, higher failure rates, and customer experience issues.
A Kenya-focused lending platform discovered this the hard way. "Our global provider claimed to support M-Pesa," their CTO told me, "but their implementation was essentially a wrapper around the basic API with none of the nuanced error handling or fallback mechanisms needed for reliable processing. Our transaction success rates were 17% lower than what we achieved after switching to a locally-optimized solution."
How to Evaluate the Answer
Dig into these areas:
Native integration depth: Ask how they've implemented local payment methods. Is it direct integration or through intermediaries?
Success rate data: Request specific transaction success rates for each payment method in your target markets.
Local knowledge: Test their understanding of market-specific challenges like mobile money timing issues or bank settlement patterns.
Reconciliation capabilities: How do they handle the complexities of reconciling across diverse African payment methods?
Market-specific optimizations: What specific features have they built to address challenges unique to your target markets?
Red Flags to Watch For
Be cautious if you encounter:
Generic "global solution" language without market-specific details
Inability to provide success rate comparisons
Recent or superficial integration with key local payment methods
Limited understanding of local regulatory nuances
The best partners will show evidence of deep, long-standing integrations with local payment systems and provide specific metrics demonstrating their performance advantages.
3. "What's your developer experience really like?"
Why This Question Matters
Your engineering team will interact with this payment API daily. A confusing, poorly documented, or inconsistent developer experience doesn't just slow implementation—it creates ongoing friction that compounds with every feature you build.
"We initially chose a provider with beautiful marketing materials and impressive-looking documentation," shared a fintech CTO based in Ghana. "But once we started coding against their API, we discovered inconsistent naming conventions, poorly documented error codes, and a support team that took days to answer technical questions. What should have been a two-week integration stretched to nearly two months."
How to Evaluate the Answer
Look beyond the polished documentation:
Request API access before deciding: Evaluate the actual developer experience, not just the marketing materials.
Speak directly with technical customers: Ask specific questions about implementation challenges and ongoing maintenance.
Test support responsiveness: Ask technical questions during your evaluation and measure response time and quality.
Examine error handling: How comprehensive and helpful are their error messages and documentation?
Check SDK quality: If they offer SDKs, review the code quality, update frequency, and community feedback.
Red Flags to Watch For
Be concerned if you see:
Resistance to providing sandbox access before commitment
Unwillingness to connect you with technical references
Outdated GitHub repositories or unanswered issues
Generic technical support rather than access to engineers who understand their system
The best payment partners pride themselves on developer experience and are eager to demonstrate it to technical decision-makers.
4. "How does compliance scale across markets?"
Why This Question Matters
As your fintech expands to new African markets, you'll face a complex web of regulatory requirements. Many technical leaders focus solely on functional requirements, only to discover that compliance becomes their biggest scaling challenge.
"When we expanded from Nigeria to Ghana and Kenya," one fintech CTO explained, "we discovered our payment provider had vastly different compliance capabilities in each market. We ended up managing three separate compliance processes with different documentation requirements, reporting formats, and regulatory interfaces. It became a significant operational burden."
How to Evaluate the Answer
Probe into these areas:
Multi-market experience: What specific markets do they operate in, and how do they handle regulatory differences?
Compliance documentation: How do they help you meet KYC, AML, and other regulatory requirements across markets?
Regulatory updates: How do they handle and communicate changes in compliance requirements?
PCI DSS scope: How do they reduce your PCI compliance burden?
Data localization: How do they handle countries with data sovereignty requirements?
Red Flags to Watch For
Be skeptical if you encounter:
Vague references to "handling compliance" without market-specific details
Pushing compliance responsibility entirely to your team
Limited experience with regulators in your target markets
Inability to provide compliance documentation examples
Look for partners who demonstrate deep regulatory relationships, proactively communicate changes, and provide tools to simplify your compliance processes across markets.
5. "What's your reliability track record during outages?"
Why This Question Matters
All systems experience downtime eventually. What separates great infrastructure partners from adequate ones is how they handle inevitable failures. Payment outages directly impact your revenue and customer trust—making this question particularly critical.
"During a major mobile money provider outage, our payment partner went completely dark," recounted a Tanzania-based fintech CTO. "No status updates, no communication, no fallback mechanisms. We were flying blind, with customers blaming us for the issue. After switching providers, we experienced a similar outage, but with a dramatically different outcome—proactive communication, clear status updates, and alternative processing routes that kept most transactions flowing."
How to Evaluate the Answer
Focus on these aspects of reliability:
Historical uptime data: Request specific uptime percentages for the markets you care about, not just global averages.
Incident response protocols: How quickly do they detect issues, and what is their communication process?
Status page quality: Review their status page history. Is it transparent or do they minimize issues?
Degradation vs. outage handling: How do they manage performance degradation as opposed to complete outages?
Postmortem process: Ask to see anonymized incident postmortems to understand their approach to problem-solving.
Red Flags to Watch For
Be concerned if you notice:
Reluctance to share specific uptime data
No public status page or incident history
Vague descriptions of redundancy without technical details
Limited monitoring specific to African payment methods
The most reliable partners combine robust technical infrastructure with transparent communication practices and a proven track record of minimizing impact during incidents.
Beyond the Questions: Evaluating What's Not Said
Sometimes the most telling insights come from what potential partners don't say. Watch for these patterns:
Deflection to sales materials when asked technical questions
Overemphasis on pricing rather than technical capabilities
Resistance to technical deep dives before contracts are signed
Limited access to engineering teams during the evaluation process
The best payment partners welcome tough technical questions and let their engineering excellence speak for itself. They're confident in their capabilities and transparent about their limitations.
Making Your Final Decision
After asking these five critical questions, how do you synthesize the answers into a decision? Consider creating a weighted scorecard that reflects your specific needs:
Map your growth trajectory: Weight scaling capabilities higher if you expect rapid growth
Prioritize market-specific needs: If you're focusing on specific African markets, local optimization may outweigh global capabilities
Consider your engineering resources: Limited technical resources may make developer experience and support quality more critical
Evaluate your risk tolerance: Regulatory complexity and reliability become even more important for certain fintech models
Remember that the "best" payment partner isn't universal—it's the one that best aligns with your specific business requirements, technical architecture, and growth plans.
Conclusion: Finding a Partner Built for African Fintech Success
Choosing a payment partner is a decision worth investing time in. The upfront diligence of asking these tough questions and thoroughly evaluating the answers will pay dividends throughout your company's growth journey.
As one successful fintech CTO put it: "The three weeks we spent rigorously evaluating payment partners saved us months of development time and hundreds of thousands of dollars in avoided replatforming costs. It was the highest ROI activity our technical team undertook in our first year."
These five questions have guided many technical leaders to better infrastructure decisions—and they've also shaped how we've built IntaSend's payment infrastructure platform. As a solution developed specifically for African fintech innovation, we've focused on addressing the exact challenges highlighted in this article:
Built to scale with your ambitions: Our architecture handles everything from MVP to millions of daily transactions
Deep local market optimization: Native integrations with M-Pesa and local banking systems, optimized for higher success rates
Developer experience at the core: Comprehensive SDKs, transparent documentation, and engineering-led support
Multi-market compliance built-in: Streamlined regulatory compliance across our seven supported African countries
Reliability you can trust: 99.9 %+ uptime with transparent communication during the rare service incidents
We believe your payment infrastructure should be an enabler of your fintech vision, not a limitation. That's why we've built IntaSend to be the foundation that African fintech innovators can confidently build upon.
If you're evaluating payment partners for your fintech, we welcome your toughest technical questions. Our engineering team is available to discuss your specific requirements and demonstrate how our infrastructure aligns with your growth trajectory.
Your choice of payment partner will impact every aspect of your fintech's journey. Choose wisely.