When Bright Chinyundu H’20 and Andrew Airelobhegbe H’20 ended up as roommates at the Harambe Bretton Woods Symposium in 2021, neither expected the chance meeting to grow into a friendship, let alone a cross-border business partnership. Chinyundu, founder and CEO of Zambia’s BroadPay, and Airelobhegbe, co-founder and CEO of Nigeria’s Lenco, have spent the years since turning that connection into a real alliance reshaping fintech across two markets. What began as a shared conversation between strangers has now become a live, branded product on the ground in Zambia.
Navigating Early Challenges at BroadPay
Chinyundu started BroadPay in 2013, aiming to simplify payments for Zambian businesses. Early success came at a cost: after taking on seed capital, he found himself answerable to a majority investor who called most of the shots. Determined to regain control, he built a second product, Sparkle, as a path back to independence. He eventually bought out the original investor and folded Sparkle into BroadPay’s operations, setting up the company for the bigger ambitions that would follow.
The Harambeans Alliance: A Catalyst for Collaboration
The real turning point came through the Harambeans Alliance. Looking to grow beyond Zambia’s small domestic market, Chinyundu began pitching his ideas within the network, which led to that fateful roommate pairing with Airelobhegbe at Bretton Woods. Lenco was wrestling with similar business-banking problems in Nigeria, and the two founders quickly saw the overlap. With Airelobhegbe’s backing, Sparkle got its start in the Nigerian market operating under Lenco’s license, the first concrete step in what would become a much closer relationship.
Alliance events in Lagos kept the momentum going. One meetup reconnected Chinyundu with GB Agboola of Flutterwave, someone he’d first met years earlier during an Alibaba fellowship in China. That renewed relationship led Chinyundu to set up a Sparkle office in the same building as Flutterwave’s headquarters, giving him a foothold and a level of confidence operating in an unfamiliar market.
A Divide-and-Conquer Strategy for Regional Growth
As Sparkle gained traction, Chinyundu set his sights on South Africa, but ran into regulatory obstacles there. He and Airelobhegbe responded by settling on a regional division of labor: Sparkle would lead in Southern Africa, where its brand fit the local market, while Lenco would remain the face of the business in Nigeria. The partnership positioned Chinyundu to keep eyeing expansion into Malawi, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Mozambique, and Angola.
Where the Partnership Landed: Lenco by BroadPay
That “divide and conquer” strategy has since produced its clearest result yet: a formal joint go-to-market in Zambia. In late 2023, Lenco officially launched in the Zambian market in partnership with BroadPay Zambia Limited, a licensed Payment System Business under the Bank of Zambia, combining Lenco’s business-banking product with BroadPay’s local regulatory footing. The resulting offering, branded Lenco by BroadPay, gives Zambian businesses the same current-account, payment-link, mobile money, and expense-management tools Lenco built for Nigerian SMEs, now running on BroadPay’s licensed local rails.
Lenco co-founder and COO Impact Airelobhegbe framed the move as a long-term commitment to the market rather than a simple product rollout, emphasizing local teams and local partnership as the foundation for sustainable growth in Zambia. CEO Andrew Airelobhegbe echoed that Lenco’s goal was to understand the specific challenges facing Zambian businesses and build for them directly, rather than simply exporting a Nigerian product unchanged.
Today, Lenco by BroadPay operates as a distinct, licensed entry point for Lenco’s pan-African ambitions, proof that the “divide and conquer” strategy Chinyundu and Airelobhegbe sketched out wasn’t just a talking point but a template. Lenco has since gone on to describe itself as live in Nigeria, Zambia, and Malawi, with Kenya and Rwanda in the pipeline, using the same playbook of local licensed partners established with BroadPay.
Building Networks for Success
Chinyundu credits the Alliance for the venture’s survival and growth, describing the network as the reason his company is still standing today. Okendo Lewis-Gayle, Chairman and Founder of Harambeans, has pointed to this story as proof of what the network does best: helping founders who share values build trust with each other and turn that trust into real collaboration across borders.
A Blueprint for Pan-African Innovation
What started as a chance hotel-room pairing at a symposium has become a working model for how African founders can expand across borders without waiting on foreign capital or foreign playbooks: find a trusted peer in the market you want to enter, lean on their license and local knowledge, and let the partnership do the regulatory heavy lifting. Chinyundu and Airelobhegbe’s story, from strangers, to friends, to a live joint product on the ground in Zambia, is the clearest evidence yet that the Alliance’s core bet on relationships pays off in balance sheets, not just goodwill.