African Tech Roundup: Elizabeth Rossiello Reflects on a Decade in African Fintech

In an African Tech Roundup op-ed, AZA Finance founder and CEO Elizabeth Rossiello reflects on her decade-long journey from founding BitPesa in Nairobi in 2013 to building AZA Finance into a pan-African fintech leader. She shares lessons on scaling in a challenging environment, from navigating regulatory hurdles to countering persistent misconceptions about African markets. Elizabeth highlights how AZA Finance has grown into a global payments and FX platform, moving billions in volume and serving more than 1.5 million customers across 183 countries. Her reflections underscore the resilience, data-driven strategy, and long-term vision required to thrive in frontier markets, and her message to founders is simple: keep building, ignore the noise, and trust your vision.

Read the full op-ed here.