Parallex Bank
“Can a Nigerian challenger bank build the full retail-plus-payments stack for African SMBs and consumers?”
Founded2020
HQLagos, Nigeria
Total raised$10M
Latest roundDebt Financing, 2023
IndustryBank / National
The story
Founded in 2020 as Parallex Microfinance Bank in Lagos, Nigeria, the company transitioned into a full commercial bank licensed by the Central Bank of Nigeria. It now offers retail and business banking including a payment gateway product (Parallex Pay) that competes with Nigerian PSPs like Paystack, Flutterwave, and SeerBit — while notably relying on SeerBit's underlying API infrastructure for its own payment gateway.
Last 12 months
Product timeline
2020
Founded as Parallex Microfinance Bank in Lagos, Nigeria· founding
2022
Transitioned from microfinance to commercial bank licensed by Central Bank of Nigeria· pivot
2023
Raised $10M debt financing led by African Export-Import Bank· funding
Regulated entities
1
regulatory licence held by Parallex Bank
Licence types, jurisdictions and registered entities are in the Embedded Finance Index report.
The stack
3 layers disclosed in Parallex Bank’s embedded-finance stack
Payments / PSP
SeerBitParallex Pay (self-operated)
Banking / BaaS
in the full report
Card network
in the full report
Accounting gap: none
3 more providers across 2 layers, with confidence-scored evidence and source URLs, are in the Embedded Finance Index report.