ABA Editorial · Nov 30, 2025 · 16 min read
OmniRetail was founded in 2019 by Deepankar Rustagi. By 2023 it was EBITDA positive. By 2024 it was net profitable. By early 2025 it had been named Africa's fastest growing company by the Financial Times. The company's fintech engine, OmniPay, processes over USD 800 million in annual transactions and maintains non-performing loans below 0.5 percent. This is the story of how an Indian-born entrepreneur built what has become one of the most disciplined operators in African fintech.
Deepankar Rustagi was born and raised in Delhi, India, and came to Nigeria through an earlier venture before founding OmniRetail. In 2015 he launched VConnect, an online marketplace that connected Nigerian consumers with local service providers. The experience of running VConnect taught Rustagi specific things about Nigerian consumer behavior, logistics infrastructure, and the limits of pure marketplace business models in African markets. When he founded OmniRetail in 2019, the company was positioned to serve a different customer: not individual Nigerian consumers but the small retailers who sell fast-moving consumer goods to those consumers. This pivot from B2C to B2B turned out to be one of the most consequential strategic choices in African fintech. OmniRetail is now one of the few African B2B e-commerce operators to have reached durable profitability, and its fintech arm OmniPay has built what is probably the most disciplined small-ticket lending book in African fintech. This is how the company got there.
The starting insight was structural. Nigerian retail distribution, particularly for fast-moving consumer goods like beverages, packaged foods, household products, and personal care items, operated through a fragmented chain of manufacturers, large distributors, smaller sub-distributors, and ultimately hundreds of thousands of small neighborhood retailers. Each step of the chain added inefficiency: stock visibility was poor, pricing was inconsistent, credit terms were opaque, and delivery was unreliable. The small retailers who sat at the end of the chain suffered most from these inefficiencies because they had the least negotiating power.
OmniRetail's proposition was to digitize the relationship between manufacturers, distributors, and small retailers by building a platform that let retailers order products directly from an integrated inventory, receive reliable delivery, and pay under transparent terms. Manufacturers benefited from better visibility into retail demand. Distributors benefited from more predictable order flow. Retailers benefited from better prices and dependable supply. This is a well-worn pitch in developed markets, but executing it in Nigerian conditions was a very different operational challenge than it was in markets with better infrastructure.
What separated OmniRetail from many of its peers in the African B2B e-commerce space was a specific choice about capital intensity. Some competitors built large physical distribution networks, acquired fleet vehicles, and held significant inventory on their own balance sheets. This approach produced growth but at enormous capital cost and operational risk. OmniRetail instead built a coordination layer that orchestrated the existing distribution infrastructure, working with manufacturers, distributors, and logistics providers rather than replacing them. The company was asset-light relative to its competitors, which meant its unit economics were fundamentally different.
This operational philosophy carried through to how the company approached its financial services products. When OmniRetail launched OmniPay, its fintech engine, it did not try to build a standalone consumer lending operation. OmniPay served the specific financing needs of the retailers already operating on the OmniRetail platform: inventory credit that let them order goods without immediate cash outlay, with repayment terms aligned to the retailers' actual cash flow cycles. This is embedded finance rather than consumer lending, and the difference matters for unit economics.
OmniRetail's path to profitability is one of the clearest in African fintech. The company reached EBITDA positive status in 2023, which was a remarkable achievement given how many of its peers were still burning capital aggressively at the same time. By 2024 the company had moved to net profitability, which is the rarer and more durable milestone. According to company disclosures cited in multiple industry reports, OmniRetail reached these milestones through a combination of disciplined growth, operational cost management, and the embedded finance revenue from OmniPay that compounded as the retailer base expanded.
By 2024, OmniRetail was processing over NGN 1.3 trillion (approximately USD 810 million at prevailing exchange rates) in annual transactions. OmniPay was disbursing approximately USD 4 million per month in BNPL-style inventory credit to the retailer base. The non-performing loan ratio, the metric that ultimately determines whether embedded finance is a durable business or an accounting illusion, was below 0.5 percent. This figure is substantially better than typical consumer lending NPL ratios in African markets, which commonly run in the 3 to 10 percent range depending on the operator and segment.
The sub-0.5 percent NPL is not an accident. It is the direct result of the embedded finance structure OmniRetail built. OmniPay does not lend to retailers based on credit bureau data, self-reported income, or traditional collateral. It lends based on the retailer's observable order history on the OmniRetail platform, the retailer's payment track record across prior credit cycles, and the commercial relationship that ties the retailer's next order to the repayment of the last one. If a retailer fails to repay an OmniPay credit line, OmniRetail can suspend the retailer's access to the platform, which removes the retailer's primary source of inventory and creates an immediate and powerful incentive to resolve the default. This is not the kind of leverage a standalone consumer lender has.
The data advantage compounds over time. Every transaction on the OmniRetail platform generates additional data that improves the credit scoring model, identifies high-risk retailers before default occurs, and lets the platform adjust credit limits dynamically based on actual business performance. Traditional banks cannot replicate this advantage because they do not have the transaction visibility. This is the structural reason embedded finance works where standalone SME lending often fails.
In 2024 and 2025, OmniRetail was named the fastest-growing company in Africa by the Financial Times. The recognition reflected the combination of revenue growth, operational profitability, and sustainable unit economics that set the company apart from peers still chasing growth at any cost. By early 2025, the company worked with over 200 manufacturers, nearly 5,000 distributors, and approximately 140,000 retailers across Nigeria. It had also expanded into Ghana, which offered an early test of whether the OmniRetail model could translate to a different African market.
Three things. First, the decision to be B2B rather than B2C. Most African e-commerce operators in the 2015-2020 period were pursuing consumer-facing models that struggled with the combination of low basket sizes, high logistics costs, and expensive customer acquisition. OmniRetail served businesses, which meant higher order frequency, larger basket sizes, and more durable customer relationships. Second, the asset-light coordination model avoided the capital intensity that sank several competitors. OmniRetail did not need to build a physical distribution network because it could orchestrate the existing one better than anyone else was doing. Third, OmniPay was built as embedded finance from the start, not retrofitted as a separate business line. This gave it the data advantage and the operational leverage that produced the sub-0.5 percent NPL, which is the central commercial fact about the company.
The Ghana expansion, and any further country expansion beyond Nigeria, will test whether the OmniRetail model works in markets with different retail structures, different distributor relationships, and different regulatory environments. Ghana shares enough with Nigeria that the early results are promising, but moving into Francophone West Africa, East Africa, or Southern Africa would require the model to adapt to much more different conditions. The question of how far the operational playbook transfers is the question that defines the next phase of the business.
The macroeconomic exposure is also significant. OmniRetail's business depends on Nigerian retail demand, which is sensitive to inflation, currency movements, and consumer purchasing power. A severe Nigerian economic downturn would stress the entire retailer base simultaneously, which would stress OmniPay's loan book in ways the company has not yet had to navigate. The 2024 and 2025 performance was achieved during a period of significant Nigerian currency volatility, which is encouraging, but a deeper downturn remains a real scenario.
OmniRetail's significance is that it has demonstrated a commercially sustainable path to profitability in African B2B financial services at a time when many peers were failing. The combination of B2B focus, asset-light operations, and embedded finance produces a business model that does not require the aggressive consumer marketing, capital-intensive logistics, or growth-at-all-costs strategies that characterized earlier generations of African fintech. For founders building their next African fintech, the OmniRetail template is probably the clearest example of what an operationally disciplined B2B fintech looks like in practice. For investors, it is a reminder that profitability in African fintech is not impossible. It is simply rarer than the narrative suggests, and it tends to belong to founders who chose operational discipline over growth theater.