Africa’s next technology giants may already be hiding inside its largest institutions

Africa’s technology conversation has traditionally looked outward—to startups, venture capital, global technology companies and the next generation of founders.

But there may be another source of technology innovation hiding in plain sight: the significant intellectual property and technology capabilities already being built inside Africa’s established institutions.

Banks are developing sophisticated payment and digital banking platforms. Telecommunications companies are building infrastructure serving millions of customers. Similar capabilities are emerging within healthcare, energy, universities and public institutions.

This raises an important question:

What if some of Africa’s next significant technology businesses have already been built—but are still being managed as internal technology projects?

Building technology is not the same as building a technology business

Over the past two decades, building enterprise technology has become significantly easier. Cloud computing has lowered infrastructure barriers, open-source software has accelerated development, artificial intelligence is improving engineering productivity, and technical talent has become increasingly accessible.

Technology itself is therefore not always the constraint. The bigger challenge is often organisational. Building technology requires architecture, engineering, delivery and reliability.

Building a technology business requires markets, distribution, economics and governance. One creates capability. The other creates markets.

This distinction explains why large institutions can successfully invest in sophisticated technology yet struggle to turn internally developed intellectual property into viable external businesses.

When an internal solution becomes something more. Consider financial services. Banks routinely develop technology to solve specific operational problems: modernising legacy infrastructure, reducing dependency on external vendors, improving customer experience, lowering transaction costs or creating greater flexibility in product development.

Initially, the business case is internal. There is a problem. The institution builds a solution.But when that technology matures and begins solving problems shared by other institutions, its strategic character changes.

The question is no longer simply: Does this technology work for us? It becomes: Could this technology create value for an industry? At that point, technology strategy becomes corporate strategy. The capability changes. Governance often does not. This is where many organisations encounter difficulty.

A platform may have started as an internal project. Over time, repeated use makes it reliable. Institutional knowledge develops around it. Its functionality expands and external market relevance becomes apparent.

Yet the organisation continues to manage it as an internal IT asset. Its budget remains part of the technology function. Product decisions remain tied to the priorities of the parent organisation. Investment competes with unrelated internal projects. Governance remains designed for institutional control rather than market responsiveness.

The technology has evolved. The governance around it has not. This is one of the central challenges of enterprise innovation.

From internal necessity to ecosystem impact

There is a useful way to think about how these capabilities evolve. They typically move through five stages:

Solve: A genuine organisational problem creates the need to build.

Build: Repeated use transforms the solution into a reliable and differentiated capability.

Escape: The capability demonstrates relevance beyond the institution that created it.

Reconfigure: Leadership adapts governance, partnerships, investment or operating structures to enable scale.

Amplify: The capability begins creating value across organisations, industries or potentially national systems.

The difficult stage is often not building the technology. It is recognising when the capability has reached the point where its governance must change. And separation is not necessarily the answer. Some capabilities should remain internal. Others may be licensed, commercialised through partnerships, developed as shared platforms or established as independent businesses. The strategic question is whether leadership has consciously chosen the structure that allows the asset to realise its full potential.

A different conversation for African boards

This should influence how boards and executive teams think about technology investment. Technology understandably appears in boardrooms through the lenses of cost, cybersecurity, operational resilience, regulatory compliance and transformation.

But perhaps another set of questions should increasingly be asked:

What technology capabilities have we built that constitute strategic intellectual property? Do they solve only our problem—or a broader market problem? Could they generate economic value beyond our institution?  Is our current governance enabling that opportunity or constraining it? What would we do differently if we viewed the capability as strategic IP rather than simply an internal technology project?

These questions matter because organisations may possess significant economic value in technology assets that are not immediately visible on their balance sheets.

Africa should start looking inside

Across Africa, established institutions have spent decades solving difficult problems under unique operating conditions. They have built around infrastructure constraints, fragmented markets and complex distribution environments. They have developed payment systems, digital channels, identity capabilities and financial platforms capable of operating at significant scale.

Many of these capabilities may never become widely known—not because they lack value, but because they were never designed to travel beyond the institutions that created them. Africa should continue investing in startups and supporting entrepreneurs.

But we should also recognise that some of the continent’s most valuable future technology companies may emerge from intellectual property already sitting inside established institutions. Perhaps the next phase of African innovation is therefore not only about what we can build, but whether leaders can recognise when what has already been built is ready to become something more.

This article draws from the broader ideas explored in Built Inside: Why Great Enterprises Build Great Technologies — But Rarely Build Great Technology Companies, which examines the institutional paradox, the Capability Escape Framework™, leadership choices and the opportunity for African institutions to turn internal capabilities into wider ecosystem value. Read the full article here

About the Author

Olayinka Oni is Group Executive Director and Chief Operating Officer of Sterling Financial Holdings Company Plc. His career spans consulting, global technology and banking leadership, including senior technology roles at Microsoft, Wema Bank and Sterling. His work focuses on technology strategy, operational resilience, enterprise innovation and institution building.