Something is increasingly difficult to ignore about Africa’s payments conversation: the continent is not short of money, businesses, or economic activity.
It lacks frictionless ways to move value across borders.
That distinction came through repeatedly during my conversations with leaders building across Africa’s cross-border payments, stablecoin, and financial infrastructure ecosystem at WAKA NiGHTS Lagos, hosted by WAKA CEO April Long.
From WAKA’s Africa-Asia payments thesis to Busha’s stablecoin infrastructure, NOMBA’s push for multi-currency business banking, Flexifai’s AI-driven payment routing, and PayOnUs’ effort to connect Africa’s fragmented payment systems, the conversations pointed toward the same underlying problem from different directions.
Africa is geographically connected but financially fragmented.
And the next chapter of African fintech may be less about creating another payment app and more about building the infrastructure that allows money, currencies, businesses, and financial products to move across those fragmented borders.
The problem is no longer simply access to dollars
Michael Ogongo, Head of Partnerships at WAKA, put the evolution of the problem into perspective.
WAKA describes itself as an Africa-Asia cross-border payments company focused on enabling trade between the two regions. According to Ogongo, the company’s early problem was familiar: African businesses struggled to access dollars to make outbound payments, particularly when paying suppliers in China.
But he believes that problem is changing.
“Nigeria has solved that issue,” Ogongo said, arguing that the next challenge is bringing existing informal and under-institutionalized trade into compliant financial channels.
That is a subtle but important shift.
The question is increasingly not:
Can African businesses trade internationally?
They already do.
The question is:
Can the financial infrastructure supporting that trade become formal, compliant, efficient, and scalable?
Ogongo sees Nigeria as an important testing ground because of its relatively large transaction volumes and more developed fintech ecosystem. WAKA can test payment flows in Nigeria and then apply what it learns across other African markets, he said.
That makes Nigeria less of an endpoint and more of a laboratory for solving an African problem.
Africa’s fragmentation is the problem
Chioma Ozoejike, Head of Business Development at PayOnUs, offered perhaps the simplest explanation of why the problem persists.
“Africa is economically fragmented despite being geographically connected,” she said.
Her reasoning is straightforward: Africa has 54 countries, each with different currencies, banking systems, payment rules, and settlement processes. A business operating across several African markets can therefore encounter significant friction even when the countries involved are geographically close.
This is where the cross-border payments conversation becomes bigger than remittances.
Consider a Nigerian company doing business in Kenya.
It may need to:
Collect money in Kenya, convert Kenyan shillings, move value across borders, receive or settle in Nigeria, convert to naira.
Every additional intermediary, currency conversion, and compliance requirement potentially adds another layer of friction.
The same problem exists between African businesses and suppliers outside the continent.
And it is why solving cross-border payments is fundamentally an infrastructure problem.
The dollar may not always be the middleman
Damian Ezediunor of NOMBA Financial Services took the conversation one step further.
NOMBA operates business banking and multi-currency products alongside cross-border payment services in Nigeria and other markets, according to Ezediunor.
He described the movement of money — rather than the existence of money itself — as a core problem.
Liquidity remains part of that challenge because African currencies frequently rely on the U.S. dollar as an intermediary currency for international settlement.
But stablecoins could introduce another possibility.
“If there’s a shift from that to stablecoin, yes, then we have like a flexible asset, a flexible currency,” Ezediunor said.
The important caveat is that replacing the dollar intermediary with USDT or USDC does not magically eliminate liquidity constraints.
A stablecoin has to be liquid where and when it is needed.
Ezediunor offered a useful example: someone in Nairobi should theoretically be able to exchange Kenyan shillings for USDC, while someone in Nigeria receives USDC and converts it immediately into naira.
If that can happen efficiently, the traditional intermediary currency becomes less important.
But the liquidity still has to exist on both sides.
That may be one of the most important challenges for Africa’s stablecoin economy.
Stablecoins are moving from crypto infrastructure toward financial infrastructure
Moyo Shodipo, co-founder and COO of Busha, sees the next five years as a period in which stablecoins become increasingly integrated with traditional finance.
Busha describes itself as a digital-asset exchange and stablecoin infrastructure provider focused on Africa. Shodipo said stablecoin acceptance has grown substantially compared with five years ago, with more companies integrating them into financial flows.
But his bigger prediction is not about crypto exchanges.
He wants to see banks themselves incorporate stablecoins into their products.
“What I want in the next five years is banks having stablecoins embedded one way or the other into their products, powered by our infrastructure.”
That is a significant distinction.
If stablecoins remain confined to crypto exchanges, their impact on the broader financial system will remain relatively narrow.
If banks, payment companies and financial institutions begin integrating stablecoins into existing products, they become something different:
financial infrastructure.
And that appears to be where the market is heading.
Regulation is no longer the only obstacle
Interestingly, Shodipo doesn’t believe regulation is necessarily the biggest threat to stablecoin adoption in Nigeria anymore.
“Five years ago, I would have said regulation,” he said. “But today I would say the speed of execution.”
He acknowledged that regulators are becoming more open to the technology and pointed to the emergence of regulatory sandboxes as a positive development.
The challenge, in his view, is pace.
That sentiment is echoed from a different angle by Chukwuma Thaddeus of Flexifai.
Flexifai describes itself as an AI-optimized payment platform operating across Africa, Europe and Latin America. Thaddeus identified regulatory constraints as one of the major problems the company faces when operating across African markets.
The difference is revealing.
For stablecoin infrastructure providers, the challenge can be getting regulators and traditional financial institutions comfortable enough to integrate new technology.
For payment companies operating across multiple African markets, the challenge is often that every country has its own regulatory framework.
One continent, dozens of rulebooks
Thaddeus pointed to the difference between operating in relatively flexible markets such as Nigeria and more restrictive jurisdictions.
Ezediunor made the same point from NOMBA’s perspective.
The rules governing a payment in Nigeria are not necessarily the rules governing a payment in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
And once a transaction crosses both jurisdictions, the company has to satisfy the regulatory requirements of both.
Now multiply that across dozens of African markets.
Ezediunor described compliance and licensing as fundamental bottlenecks to building global payment infrastructure.
This is where the grand idea of a borderless African payment system meets the reality of national regulation.
The technology may be capable of moving value instantly.
The legal and compliance infrastructure still has to catch up.
The payment rail itself is becoming intelligent
Flexifai brings another layer into this story: how the payment gets routed.
Thaddeus said Flexifai’s AI infrastructure is designed to optimize payment routing rather than simply process transactions through the same pathways used by traditional payment platforms.
The objective, he explained, is to give merchants more consistent approval rates across different markets by routing payments differently according to the circumstances.
That is an important evolution.
The future payment rail may not simply ask:
“Can this payment go through?”
It may increasingly ask:
“What is the best route for this payment to go through?”
Currency, geography, payment method, liquidity, compliance requirements, and historical approval performance can all become variables in that equation.
AI then becomes less of a marketing layer and more of an optimization layer sitting underneath the payment.
The next five years may be about rebuilding the bank
This was perhaps the most ambitious idea to emerge from the WAKA conversation.
Ogongo believes remittance and payments companies will continue moving beyond their traditional roles.
FX is one vertical.
Then come wallets.
Then lending.
Then corporate financial products such as fixed income.
His broader thesis is that financial companies are effectively recreating the functions of banks, increasingly on-chain.
That is a much bigger proposition than faster remittances.
Imagine a business being able to:
Collect payments
– hold multiple currencies
– convert FX
– pay suppliers
– access working capital
– earn on idle balances
– settle internationally
without having to stitch together five different financial providers.
That is the direction in which much of African fintech appears to be moving.
The difference is that the underlying infrastructure may increasingly include blockchain networks and stablecoins.
But stablecoins don’t solve everything
This is where the conversations become useful precisely because the participants did not describe a frictionless future.
Stablecoins can potentially make settlement faster.
They can reduce dependence on correspondent banking pathways.
They can provide a common digital asset across fragmented currency systems.
But they don’t automatically solve:
Liquidity.
Regulation.
Licensing.
Local currency conversion.
Payment acceptance.
Compliance.
Trust.
NOMBA’s Ezediunor captured the liquidity problem particularly well: even if USDC or USDT becomes the intermediary asset, there still needs to be enough liquidity for users to move from local currency into stablecoins and back again.
That may ultimately be one of the defining battles of Africa’s stablecoin infrastructure.
The real opportunity may be the connections between these companies
This is what stood out to me most from the conversations at WAKA NiGHTS.
The companies represented in these interviews are solving different pieces of the same problem.
WAKA
Connecting African businesses with Asian trade and building cross-border payment infrastructure.
Busha
Building digital-asset and stablecoin infrastructure and looking toward deeper integration between stablecoins and traditional finance.
NOMBA
Building business banking, multi-currency products and cross-border payments while confronting liquidity, licensing and regulatory fragmentation.
Flexifai
Using AI-driven payment routing to improve payment approval and processing across different markets.
PayOnUs
Addressing the fragmentation of African collections, payouts and cross-border payments across different currencies and financial systems.
These aren’t identical businesses.
But they are increasingly operating around the same infrastructure problem.
Africa’s next payments battle may not be about apps
For years, African fintech innovation was largely presented through the lens of consumer applications:
Send money.
Receive money.
Pay bills.
Buy something.
The next phase could be considerably less visible to consumers.
It could happen underneath the apps.
The infrastructure layer will determine:
- how currencies connect;
- how stablecoins enter traditional finance;
- how businesses pay international suppliers;
- how liquidity moves between African markets;
- how payments are routed;
- how compliance is managed;
- and eventually how financial products are delivered on-chain.
In that world, the winners may not necessarily be the companies with the most visible consumer brands.
They may be the companies that make the underlying rails cheaper, faster, more reliable and easier to connect.
From Africa-Asia trade to an interconnected financial system
There is another thread worth pulling from Ogongo’s comments.
WAKA’s immediate focus is Africa-Asia trade, but he also referenced Latin America and other emerging markets as part of the broader opportunity.
That suggests the ultimate opportunity isn’t necessarily an African payment network operating in isolation.
It could be a network connecting emerging markets and global trade corridors.
Africa doesn’t need to become financially identical to developed markets to participate more effectively in global commerce.
It needs infrastructure that understands the complexity of emerging markets and can move through it.
My takeaway
Walking away from these conversations, I don’t think the most interesting question is:
“Will stablecoins replace banks?”
That question is too simplistic.
The more interesting question is:
What happens when banks, fintechs, stablecoin companies, and payment infrastructure providers begin using the same underlying rails?
WAKA is looking at the trade corridor.
Busha is looking at the stablecoin infrastructure.
NOMBA is looking at business banking, liquidity, and multi-currency settlement.
Flexifai is looking at payment routing.
PayOnUs is looking at the fragmentation between African markets.
Put those pieces together, and a much bigger picture emerges.
Africa’s financial infrastructure is being rebuilt in layers.
Some of those layers will remain firmly inside traditional finance.
Others will use stablecoins and blockchain networks.
AI will increasingly determine how payments are routed.
Regulation will determine how far and how quickly these systems can scale.
And liquidity will determine whether the rails actually work at the moment a business needs them.
The opportunity, ultimately, isn’t just moving money across borders.
It is making those borders matter less to the movement of legitimate economic activity.
As Ogongo put it when asked why Africa represents such an important opportunity for WAKA:
“Where there’s friction there’s opportunity.”
That may be the simplest description of Africa’s next payments opportunity.
You may also like my previous note: Stablecoins Are No Longer Just Money to Hold. Africa Is Building the Cards to Spend Them.
