Build vs buy: making the reward infrastructure decision for African businesses

Every business that needs reward programme infrastructure eventually faces the same question: do we build this ourselves or buy a platform? The answer sounds like it should depend on company size and technical capability. In practice it depends on something more specific — what you're actually comparing the costs of, and what 'build' really means in the African market context.

The build vs buy conversation in software typically starts with the wrong framing. "Build" sounds like it means writing some code. "Buy" sounds like paying a monthly subscription. The reality in the reward infrastructure context is considerably more complex — and the true cost of building is considerably higher than the initial technical estimate suggests.

This piece makes the case for buying in most circumstances. It also makes honest concessions about the cases where building makes sense, so the argument holds up under scrutiny.

What "build" actually means for reward infrastructure

When a technical team estimates the cost of building reward infrastructure in-house, they typically scope: API endpoints for reward issuance, a database to store reward records, a delivery integration with an SMS gateway or WhatsApp Business API, a basic admin dashboard. Three to six months of engineering. Reasonable.

What they don't scope — because these requirements only become clear after launch:

• Merchant catalogue curation and maintenance

  The brands available for redemption need to be contracted with, integrated with their POS or voucher systems, and kept current as they open new locations, change their redemption processes, or exit the catalogue. In Nigeria alone, maintaining a credible 20-brand catalogue is a full-time operational role, not a one-time integration.

• USSD session management

  Building a reliable USSD reward flow requires a telecoms integration that covers multiple operators per market, session management for the 180-second USSD timeout, graceful fallback for session failures, and retry logic that doesn't double-issue rewards. This is not a standard web development skill set.

• Multi-market compliance

  Stored-value instruments in Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa are regulated differently. Building a reward platform that operates legally in multiple markets requires either engaging local legal expertise per market or making conservative product decisions that limit what the platform can do.

• Fraud detection and prevention

  In-house reward platforms in African markets without active fraud detection typically see 5–15% fraud rates within 6 months of launch. Building effective fraud detection — device fingerprinting, velocity limiting, transaction quality scoring — is a non-trivial engineering investment that never appears in the initial build scope.

• Ongoing operations

  An in-house reward platform is not a build-once artifact. It requires ongoing maintenance, bug fixes, security patching, merchant catalogue updates, and platform evolution as new markets are added or new delivery channels emerge. The ongoing cost is typically 30–40% of the initial build cost per year.

The true cost of building

For a Nigerian fintech or FMCG company building reward infrastructure capable of handling 50,000 monthly issuances across Nigeria and Kenya:

The annual cost of a production-grade reward platform subscription covering Nigeria and Kenya at 50,000 monthly issuances is a fraction of this figure. The break-even point — where the cumulative cost of building equals the cumulative cost of buying — is typically 4–6 years at meaningful scale, and requires that the in-house build achieves functional parity with a mature platform (which most in-house builds don't, for the reasons above).

What buying actually gives you

When the build vs buy comparison is framed correctly, "buying" a reward platform means purchasing access to:

• ✓Years of accumulated merchant relationships across multiple markets
• ✓Functioning USSD integration with multiple telecoms operators
• ✓Compliance infrastructure validated across multiple regulatory environments
• ✓Fraud detection systems trained on millions of transactions
• ✓Ongoing product development that improves the platform without additional cost to you
• ✓Support infrastructure staffed by people who understand African market specifics

None of these are things that get built in the initial engineering scope. All of them take years to develop to a production-grade standard. Buying a platform is not renting software. It's accessing the accumulated operational infrastructure of an organisation that has spent those years building it.

When building actually makes sense

The build argument is strongest in specific circumstances that don't apply to most businesses:

The companies for whom building makes genuine sense are platform businesses whose reward infrastructure is itself the product — an Airtel building its own loyalty platform, a pan-African bank building proprietary cashback infrastructure at hundreds of millions of transactions per year. For everyone else — the FMCG brand, the fintech building on top of existing payment rails, the employer running recognition programmes — buying is faster, cheaper, and more capable.

Buying isn't the lazy choice. Building in-house when a better platform exists is the expensive choice dressed as strategic control.