Philip Sokoya built Payscribe to solve the problem other fintech founders shouldn’t bother about

Philip Sokoya was a senior software engineer who kept asking himself a simple question. How does airtime purchase actually work behind the scenes? That curiosity, he says, is where Payscribe began.

“I just wanted to automate things. I saw the way things were being done in the digital space and I knew there had to be a simpler, more efficient way.”

That pursuit of simplicity quietly became a company. But the real story is not just that Payscribe exists. It is what Philip had to go through before he figured out what Payscribe should actually be.

Philip Sokoya, founder, Payscribe

The pivot that changed everything

Payscribe started as a B2C product, serving individual customers with personal transactions and bill payments. It was gaining traction. Then Philip noticed something.

“We would need to spend thousands of nairas to do KYC on each customer,” he recalls. “Why not focus on businesses and let them do their KYC, then provide the financial services their customers need?”

That realisation alone might have been enough. But there was a deeper wound underneath it. Philip and his team had spent years trying to partner with the infrastructure layer of Nigerian fintech, dealing with providers like 9PSB, Stanbic IBTC, and PalmPay.

“We’ve been there. We know what it is to go through rigorous processes, documents, filling of compliance forms for a business that wants to launch card as a service, payment collection, payout. So we said, okay, we’ve gone through this. Why don’t we make it seamless and free for every business that wants to do this for their customer?”

That is the pivot. Payscribe stopped being a service provider and became an enabler. Today it sits between the complex, expensive fintech infrastructure layer and the founders who want to build on top of it, making the journey from idea to go-live as short as one or two days.

Read also: Nigerian fintechs are burning millions to acquire customers; And, the math doesn’t add up

How Payscribe works

When a business signs up to Payscribe, compliance verification takes less than 24 hours. After that, a founder gets access to a dashboard where every transaction and service is available without writing a single line of code. For technical teams, Payscribe provides SDKs they can plug directly into existing infrastructure, alongside full API access and a dedicated communication channel from day one.

“It’s not that we are just API-centric,” Philip says. “Everything you could do on the API, you can do on the dashboard. We make it seamless.”

The product suite covers collections, payouts, card-as-a-service, stablecoin off-ramp, and global multi-currency accounts. A founder who comes in with a card program idea on Monday can, compliance permitting, be live by Tuesday.

What Flutterwave and Paystack do not do

Philip is direct about competing in a market with well-funded giants. “Yes, they have the funds,” he says. “But we are much closer to our customers.”

The specific example he gives is striking. On most established platforms, a founder needs a minimum of around $5,000 to launch a card program. At Payscribe, it costs nothing to go live.

Beyond pricing, Philip built something called Growth Support, an interest-free capital facility of up to $5 million in airtime for businesses on the platform. The repayment spreads across up to 82 weeks, structured around actual transaction volumes.

Philip Sokoya

“We see what you are doing at the moment. We see your vision. We see what you are trying to achieve. Because we have been there. They don’t care about their growth or scalability. Even if a customer leaves Flutterwave right now, they are not aware. But we are very close to them.”

The WhatsApp group detail is a philosophy not a gimmick. Payscribe creates support groups with clients and walks them through integration and training in real time. For a founder trying to launch their first card program in a market where compliance alone can be a graveyard, that kind of proximity is a lifeline.

Philip is a solo founder. Payscribe, from its architecture to its logic flows, was built by him. And despite now leading a team and making executive decisions, he still works closely with his developers every day.

“As a senior software engineer who has been in this space for over 10 years, I still find myself working with my developers closely, in implementation, in designing, in logic reasoning.”

He will eventually let go of the hands-on engineering work. He knows that. The plan is to bring in a CTO when the company scales past its current lean structure. But for now, the fact that the founder understands every part of the stack is an advantage.

“My team of developers right now,” he says, “I walk them through exactly how it is done, the logic, the architecture, the flow.”

The product Philip is most excited about is the stablecoin integration. Payscribe recently launched an off-ramp stablecoin feature for businesses, and it is building toward global accounts that let businesses issue over eight multi-currency accounts and make payouts across more than 50 countries.

Philip paints a picture of what this unlocks.

Philip Sokoya, founder, Payscribe

“We are looking at businesses where they could put a USDT or USDC QR code in their restaurants. And then they could receive payment instantly, in seconds. Off-ramp this money, convert it to the conventional local currency like naira. That means your business is not limited to your locality. It is not limited by network, not limited by traditional banking ways.”

The vision is not just about restaurants. Philip sees creators using stablecoin payment links, cross-border businesses sending money without the friction of correspondent banking, and entire fintech products built on an infrastructure that did not exist for them before.

Payscribe’s mission, as Philip puts it, is to make launching and scaling fintechs easier, faster, and more affordable across Africa and beyond. From the outside, that reads like a tagline. From the inside, it reads like a decade of frustration turned into a product.

The post Philip Sokoya built Payscribe to solve the problem other fintech founders shouldn’t bother about first appeared on Technext.