Dare Okoudjou is a Beninese entrepreneur, telecommunications engineer, fintech innovator, and business leader best known as the Founder and CEO of Onafriq, formerly known as MFS Africa. He is recognized for building one of Africa’s major digital payment networks and for advancing financial interoperability across the continent.
Born and raised in Benin, Okoudjou developed an early understanding of the challenges surrounding cross-border commerce and money transfers in West Africa. His personal experiences with sending money across borders later became an important inspiration for his entrepreneurial journey.
He studied telecommunications engineering at Télécom Paris and later earned an MBA from INSEAD. He began his professional career as a management consultant with PricewaterhouseCoopers in Paris before joining MTN Group.
At MTN, Okoudjou played a significant role in developing and implementing the company’s mobile-payment strategy across 21 countries in Africa and the Middle East. This experience gave him deep insight into mobile money, telecommunications infrastructure, and the difficulties created by fragmented payment systems.
In 2009/2010, he founded MFS Africa with a vision of making financial transactions across African borders easier and more accessible. The company developed technology that connected mobile-money systems with banks, money-transfer companies, merchants, fintechs, and other financial institutions.
Under Okoudjou’s leadership, MFS Africa grew into a major pan-African payments infrastructure company, supporting cross-border transfers, merchant payments, collections, disbursements, cards, and other digital financial services. Its network expanded to hundreds of millions of mobile wallets and financial accounts across the continent.
In November 2023, MFS Africa officially rebranded as Onafriq, reflecting the company’s evolution from a mobile-financial-services platform into a broader digital payments and financial infrastructure network. The name reflects Okoudjou’s ambition to create pathways connecting African consumers and businesses with one another and with the global economy.
Beyond his role as an entrepreneur, Okoudjou is a strong advocate for financial inclusion, digital innovation, and African economic integration. His work focuses on reducing the barriers created by fragmented financial systems and enabling individuals and businesses to move money more efficiently across borders.
Today, Dare Okoudjou remains an influential figure in Africa’s fintech ecosystem. His journey from telecommunications engineering to building a major pan-African payments company demonstrates how technology and entrepreneurship can be used to address some of the continent’s most persistent financial challenges.