For thousands of Nigerian businesses, the end of each month brings a familiar anxiety: salaries are due, but customer payments have not yet cleared. Two Nigerian fintechs have now built a direct solution to that specific problem.
PaidHR, a leading payroll and HR management platform in Africa, and Zitra, a financing solutions provider for modern businesses, have teamed up to launch a Payroll Financing solution. The collaboration bridges the gap between waiting for payments and meeting payroll, ensuring employees get paid even when a business is still waiting for its own customers to pay.
The product targets a structural pain point in industries with long billing cycles, logistics, professional services, construction, and retail, where invoices are raised weeks before collections arrive. By integrating Zitra's liquidity directly into the PaidHR platform, companies can bridge the interval between invoicing and collection, ensuring that a healthy business can always meet its salary obligations on time while waiting for its revenue to settle.
The process is designed for speed. Eligible businesses can request payroll support through a streamlined review, with approved funds disbursed in time for scheduled salary payments, removing the friction of cashflow gaps and enabling continuous operations.
The scale of the platform behind the product gives the partnership immediate reach. PaidHR already serves over 400 businesses processing more than ₦47 billion in payroll annually, as highlighted in its Year-in-Review Report 2025. The new solution is designed to serve without interruption.
Both executives were direct about the problem being solved. Olakunle Awosanmi, Head of Business for PaidHR's Embedded Finance products, said: "Employees should stay protected from the natural delays of business collection cycles." Babatunde Obadero, CEO of Zitra, added: "Timing is one of the most common hurdles for growing companies. This collaboration delivers liquidity exactly where it is needed most, ensuring that a business's success isn't slowed down by the wait for incoming revenue."
The partnership extends PaidHR's embedded finance strategy, which already includes earned wage access, multi-currency wallets, and cross-border payroll across 49 currencies. Founded in 2020 by Seye Bandele and Lekan Omotosho, PaidHR has raised over $2.9 million to date, with its most recent $1.8 million seed round led by Accion Venture Lab.
For Nigeria's 44 million SMEs, which employ more than 80% of the formal workforce yet routinely operate outside the formal credit system, a payroll financing tool embedded directly into the platform that runs their HR operations is not a luxury. It is infrastructure.
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