Builders in Fintech

#14: Can African Fintechs Really Go Global?

Elizabeth Ajao — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 16:46:31 GMT

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Hello Builder 👋,

If you’ve spent more than five minutes on Fintech Twitter or LinkedIn this week, you’ve probably seen the news that Moniepoint is shutting down MonieWorld, its UK-based remittance product.

MonieWorld launched in April 2025 with a “simple” goal to help people in the UK send money to Nigeria. Less than 18 months later, the company has decided to wind it down and focus its energy on its core African business.

Now, before anyone starts writing “MonieWorld failed” think pieces, we don’t actually have all the details.

Yes, Moniepoint is shutting the product down. But the company has also shared signs of customer growth, including a 70% increase in monthly transaction volumes among some UK diaspora users. What it hasn’t shared are the numbers we’d need to judge the business itself: customers, revenue, transaction volume, or profitability.

So no, this isn’t another “Why MonieWorld failed” newsletter, I promise 😄. Instead, the announcement got me thinking about something bigger. Over the last few years, we’ve watched African fintechs expand into new countries, acquire licences, launch products abroad, and chase global opportunities. Some have thrived. Some have quietly changed direction. Some have done both.

Which raises a more interesting question: After years of African fintechs going global, what have we actually learned?

Before we go further, though, a food for thought.

When can we say that a Fintech company has truly expanded?

A lot of fintechs put “operating in 30 countries” on their websites. If they lack the infrastructure, operational capacity and regulatory capability to build a durable business in those markets, should we really call that expansion?

Leave a comment

Now, back to the conversation… Let’s start with the numbers. How often do African startups expand beyond their native regions?

The African Startup Expansion Scene

For years, the formula seemed straightforward: build a strong business at home, raise capital, enter another African market, then another, and eventually take the company beyond the continent.

TechCabal Insights’ tracking recorded 16 expansion moves in 2023, followed by 38 in 2024, an increase of 137.5% in one year. Of the 38 moves in 2024, nine went outside Africa, while the remaining expansion activity was concentrated within the continent, particularly East Africa, Southern Africa and North Africa.

By 2025, the direction of travel had become even more international. TechCabal Insights’ 2025 year-end report found that nearly 30% of startup expansion activity targeted markets outside Africa. In H1 2025 alone, 20 startups expanded into new markets, nearly half of those moves were outside Africa, and fintech accounted for the largest share of expansion activity.

What this tells us is that African fintechs have become very good at expanding. Scaling, however, is a different conversation. Crossing borders isn’t nearly as difficult as it was a decade ago. Capital is more accessible, regulators are becoming more familiar with fintechs, and there are more proven playbooks to follow. Getting into a new market is no longer the biggest hurdle.

Expansion is one thing, but scaling is what happens after the launch announcement, the press release, and the LinkedIn congratulations. It’s about building a business that’s strong enough to win customers, navigate regulation, and generate sustainable growth long after the excitement of entering a new market has faded.

Let's look at some of the different ways African fintechs have attempted expansion.

LemFi: Expansion With Infrastructure Behind It

LemFi is a good example of an African-founded fintech building an increasingly successful international business. The company has grown considerably beyond its earlier UK–Nigeria positioning.

According to the company, its services are available to users in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and parts of Europe, with transfer destinations across 20 African countries, 8 Asian countries, 8 European countries and Brazil. In total, customers can send money to 30+ countries.

Its regulatory disclosures show legal and regulated operations across multiple jurisdictions. In the UK, RightCard Payment Services Limited, trading as LemFi, is registered with the Financial Conduct Authority as an Electronic Money Institution. Its US and Canadian operations are also structured around the relevant money-services regulatory frameworks.

Lemfi’s expansion has not been simply geographical. Its regulatory footprint, product footprint and currency footprint are growing alongside its customer geography. Of course, that does not mean every new market will automatically become successful.

But it does show the difference between saying, “We are available here,” and building the infrastructure required to keep serving customers there. Which brings us to the obvious question: Does getting the licensing and infrastructure right automatically guarantee success? Not necessarily.

Chipper Cash: Licensing Doesn’t Guarantee Success

Chipper Cash offers the other side of that argument. The company publicly lists legal and regulated entities across the United States, Ghana, Nigeria, Rwanda and Uganda. On paper, that is a significant regulatory footprint, just like LemFi has too. But having the right licences or entities does not automatically answer the more difficult question: Are you winning in that market?

In early 2024, Chipper paused its US money-transfer services after parting ways with its banking partner. Two months later, US operations resumed. But this time, the proposition was different and clear: customers in the US could use Chipper to send money into African markets.

ChipperCash moved from trying to beat an American fintech at their own game. Rather it repositioned its strongest reason for existing in the US to be its connection to Africa. And that brings us to an idea that is central to whether African fintechs can truly compete internationally: The African advantage.

An African advantage is the capability, network, relationship or piece of knowledge a company gained by building in African markets, and which remains valuable after it crosses a border. For Chipper and LemFi, for example, that advantage can include deep knowledge of African payment systems and cross-border money movement.

For another company, it could be access to diaspora communities or a network of merchants and businesses. For others, the advantage may be knowing how to operate financial products across fragmented markets, multiple currencies and inconsistent infrastructure.

So perhaps the question every fintech considering a new market should ask is: What do we know or control that gives us a genuine edge to win somewhere else? Because saying “Our product worked at home” may not be enough.

The Paystack Contrast

Paystack now serves businesses in Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa, with regulatory approvals for Egypt and Rwanda, and these are markets Paystack says represent 46% of Africa’s GDP. Since Stripe acquired the company in 2020, Paystack says its total payment volume has grown more than 12 times, and in January 2026, it announced that it had reached group-level profitability.

Yet Paystack has not followed the same route of expansion into Europe or the United States. The question is why?

Paystack solved a major payments problem in African markets where payment infrastructure was fragmented and difficult for businesses to navigate. Taking that same product to the US or UK would mean entering markets already dominated by large, well-funded and deeply established infrastructure players including Stripe, its own parent company.

In every Expansion effort, there should be a deliberate attempt to answer the question of whether your company or product has enough differentiation to justify entering the new market. Why would customers switch? What problem are you solving that existing players are not? And do you have the financial, regulatory and operational capacity to compete for long enough?

This isn’t to discourage African fintechs from entering markets with strong competitors, but rather calls for genuine assessment and honesty about what they are walking into.

Maybe the Better Strategy Is Expansion Into Similar Markets?

African companies often look towards the US or UK when thinking about international expansion. But another approach is to take a model that works in one emerging market and apply it to another market with similar structural conditions.

Tyme is one of the strongest examples. The South African-born digital banking group launched GoTyme Bank in the Philippines in 2022 through a joint venture with the Gokongwei Group. Within 14 months, the Philippines operation had reached 2.3 million customers, pushing Tyme’s global customer base to 10.8 million at the time. Tyme’s data showed the model was travelling.

And it has continued. By July 2026, Tyme said it served more than 23 million customers across South Africa and the Philippines, adding about 400,000 new customers every month. It also said its South African digital bank became profitable in under five years.

The company exported an operating model for building a digital bank in emerging markets. This is another version of the African advantage. Tyme travalled with its knowledge building financial services in markets with similar structural conditions.

Is M&A the Answer?

Is buying your way in the way to do expansion right?

MNT-Halan, the Egyptian fintech giant followed the acquisition expansion playbook. The Egyptian fintech did not enter Turkey by rebuilding a financial business from scratch. In 2024, it acquired 100% of Tam Finans, a Turkish commercial finance company with a loan book exceeding $300 million.

It had earlier expanded into Pakistan through the acquisition of Advans Pakistan, giving it an existing local business and infrastructure. The company also entered the UAE, where it said it had acquired more than 40,000 customers by December 2024.

This is very different from the romantic version of startup expansion. They didn’t say that because they built it in Cairo, they’ll build it again in Istanbul. They acquired the capabilities they needed instead of spending years rebuilding them.

The thing with buying companies is that you are not just buying the Licence. You are buying the Customers, the Team, Infrastructure, and the Local knowledge. But how many African fintechs can genuinely afford this route? Probably not many. So for the vast majority, the answer is still choosing markets carefully and finding a model that can travel with its leverage. This brings us back to the original question.

So, When Will African Fintechs Become Truly Global?

Funding matters, obviously. A fintech entering a new country needs money for compliance, local teams, marketing, technology etc. But funding alone does not immediately create product-market fit.

It is not simply about getting the licences either. Chipper’s experience shows that regulatory capability does not eliminate dependence on partners or guarantee product-market fit.

Perhaps true globalisation happens when the pieces begin to work together: Capital. Regulatory capability. Local distribution. Strong risk infrastructure. Product-market fit. Everything, together, all at once.

Back to the crux of this article:

Will African Fintechs every become truly global?

The Big Take

Today, my big take is that this conversation isn’t clear-cut. There is no one-size-fits-all formula for taking an African fintech international. Maybe more funding is the answer for some companies. Maybe the answer is finding a sharper problem. Maybe it’s expanding into markets with similar structural conditions. Maybe acquiring an existing business makes more sense than starting from scratch.

So, I’ll leave the big take to you.

What’s your say on international expansion for African fintechs?

Leave a comment

What This Means for Builders

If you are building a fintech and thinking about a new market, perhaps the question is not simply, “Can we expand there?” A better approach might be: Why this market? Why us? Why now?

Do we understand the problem deeply enough to compete there? What advantage do we have that a local or global competitor does not? Can our regulatory, operational and financial infrastructure actually support the business we are trying to build?

A new market should give you something: more customers, stronger infrastructure, better economics, new capabilities, a strategic corridor or knowledge you can use elsewhere. If all it gives you is another country flag on your website, then maybe you haven’t really scaled. You’ve just expanded.

Beth’s Corner

I know some of it is marketing, but I genuinely think African fintechs need to calm down with the whole “we operate in 20 countries” thing when the actual depth of those operations can sometimes be very unclear. Being available to customers in a country is not necessarily the same as having built a real business there.

Going forward, I’d personally like to see us talk more about depth over breadth. Until then, we’ll keep celebrating the launch and telling the same expansion stories, without ever really knowing how they ended.

Quick Data Drop

📌 MTN’s fintech business processed 13 billion transactions worth $330.5 billion in just six months in H1 2026.

📌 African tech startups raised US$4.1 billion in 2025, up 25% from US$3.25 billion in 2024. The plot twist? US$1.64 billion came from debt, a record high and a 63% increase year-on-year.

📌 108 African tech debt deals were recorded in 2025, up from 77 in 2024. Debt now accounted for 41% of all startup capital raised on the continent, compared with just 17% in 2019. African startups are increasingly learning that equity isn't the only way to scale. 😮‍💨

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In Other News

Here’s what else caught my eye in June 👀:

MTN wants to go deeper into banking. Africa’s largest telecom operator is considering acquiring banking licences in selected markets as it pushes further into lending. Its CEO Ralph Mupita says lending is now one of the fastest-growing opportunities in its fintech business. Read more
Africa got another unicorn. Mobility fintech Moove raised a $250 million Series C, taking its valuation to $2.1 billion. Read more
A major Nigerian fintech fraud case has put 69 accounts on ice. A Nigerian Federal High Court ordered six fintech platforms and 12 commercial banks to place about 69 accounts on post-no-debit following allegations of fraudulent transactions involving eTranzact International.
Moniepoint’s UK experiment is over. Moniepoint is winding down MonieWorld, its UK-to-Nigeria remittance product, less than 18 months after launch. . Read the news
🇿🇦🇰🇪 A South African bank wants a bigger piece of East Africa. Nedbank is moving to acquire a 66% stake in Kenya’s NCBA in a deal valued at around $842 million. Beyond Kenya, NCBA gives Nedbank access to Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda and, importantly, its digital banking platform Loop. Read more
Airtel is reportedly preparing to list Airtel Money in London Stock Exchange, with a valuation of around $10 billion. Read more

Fintech Opportunities

These are the latest fintech jobs and opportunities that we’ve curated, so you don’t have to. Looking for a job in fintech? Shoot your shot at these roles:

Expansion Manager, Nigeria - Tether
Technical Product Manager - Graph (Send an email to hr@usegraph.co)
Head, Business & Product - Juno

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SD #10: Your Next Stablecoin Purchase May Cost More

Nnanna — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 07:31:07 GMT

Welcome to Stablecoin Digest, a bi-weekly series covering how stablecoins are reshaping payments, infrastructure, and finance across Africa and emerging markets. Each edition unpacks one big idea, grounded in data and built for builders

In the last edition, we looked at how regulation could become stablecoins’ biggest ally. Well...That aged beautifully.

Just weeks later, Nigeria published a 28-page document explaining exactly how it plans to tax the crypto industry. On 31 July, the Nigeria Revenue Service (NRS) released its Guidelines on the Taxation of Virtual Assets, which explains how digital asset transactions will be taxed under the Nigeria Tax Act 2025.

But while everyone is talking about the tax rates. The bigger story could be what it means for builders, especially Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs) in Nigeria, and what the tax reveals about where Nigeria thinks the crypto industry is headed.

Let’s start with the part that affects most people first.

Your Next Stablecoin Purchase Might Look a Little Different

Imagine you’re buying ₦1 million worth of USDT at ₦1,400 per token. A few weeks ago, you’d expect roughly 714 USDT to land in your wallet. With the new tax in effect, you’ll receive about 703 USDT.

Interestingly, nothing else has changed. You’re spending the same amount of naira, buying at the same market price, on the same exchange. The difference is the new 1.5% stamp duty that now applies whenever naira is converted into digital assets. Instead of paying the levy separately, you now receive fewer tokens.

That might not feel like much on a single transaction. But stablecoins aren’t typically something Nigerians buy once. They’re something people use repeatedly for savings, receiving payments or salaries, or simply moving into dollars when the naira becomes unpredictable.

Viewed through that lens, the duty starts to look less like a one-off fee and more like a recurring cost of accessing digital dollars.

Who Actually Pays More?

Nigeria received an estimated $92.1 billion in crypto value between July 2024 and June 2025. Over 65% of the inflows were stablecoins, mostly USDT and USDC. This means that almost every stablecoin user will feel the new levy’s impact, regardless of what they use stablecoins for.

If You Save in USDT Every Month

Every payday, you move part of your salary into USDT or USDC to preserve its value. If you convert ₦100,000 every month, the new rules mean you’ll pay roughly ₦1,500 in stamp duty each time—about ₦18,000 over the course of a year.

That’s before you’ve made any investment return. In fact, many people in this category aren’t trying to make money at all. They’re simply trying to hold onto the purchasing power of the money they’ve already earned.

If You’re Paying Suppliers Abroad

Many Nigerian businesses turned to stablecoins because traditional cross-border payments were slow, expensive or, in some cases, simply unavailable.

The new duty increases the cost of moving from naira into stablecoins, so every supplier payment becomes slightly more expensive. But that doesn’t automatically make stablecoins the wrong choice. When compared with correspondent banking delays, FX restrictions and settlement uncertainty, many businesses may still decide the extra cost is worth paying.

The maths has changed. The value proposition hasn’t changed nearly as much.

If You’re Receiving USDT from Overseas

Freelancers and remote workers have been asking a different question: “Does this affect the money I receive from clients?”

Not in the same way. The stamp duty primarily applies when naira is converted into digital assets. So if you’re simply receiving USDT from abroad, the guidelines don’t suddenly create a new tax every time a client pays you.

The bigger question is what happens when you eventually convert those funds back into naira because that’s where the regulated platforms facilitating those transactions now have new responsibilities.

Nigerian VASPs Are Now Ad-Hoc NRS Branches

The bigger story is for crypto service providers. If you’re building an exchange, wallet or stablecoin-powered product, the biggest challenge isn’t explaining the new taxes to users. Here’s what the new duty means for your product:

Tax IDs Become Part of Onboarding

For years, onboarding revolved around identity verification. Users uploaded a selfie, entered their BVN or NIN, and completed KYC. Now, a valid Tax Identification Number (TIN) is a mandatory requirement.

That means crypto platforms are no longer just verifying who a customer is. They’re also verifying whether that customer exists within Nigeria’s tax system.

Your Ledger Has to Become Tax-aware

Recording balances isn’t enough anymore. Crypto platforms now need to know when every asset was acquired, how much was acquired, what it was worth in USD, the applicable exchange rate at the time, and the user’s eventual disposal price.

Every future tax calculation depends on getting that historical data right. That’s a new territory for products originally built around trading, not tax accounting.

You’re Withholding Tokens—Not Naira

The most unusual part of the guidelines is that certain taxes are collected in the digital asset itself. That means your product isn’t simply calculating a tax liability. It has to deduct tokens, apply consistent rounding rules, maintain accurate balances and prepare those assets for remittance. It’s a much more complicated workflow than deducting a percentage in naira.

You’re Also Responsible for Remittance

Collecting the tax is only half the job. You are expected to hold those assets separately and remit them to the NRS on prescribed schedules. In practice, that introduces entirely new operational questions around custody, treasury management and reconciliation that many crypto businesses have never needed to solve before.

And You’ll Need Records Kept for Years

The guidelines also require extensive record retention, including transaction history, acquisition details and valuation records. For builders, this changes how databases are designed, how exports work, and how historical transaction data survives future migrations.

So, What Comes Next?

Nigeria tried taxing digital assets before. The difference this time is the level of enforcement, as licensed platforms now collect and remit taxes by default. With stamp duty projected to generate ₦752 billion by 2028 from ₦456 billion in 2025, the timing is also understandable.

Will a 1.5% duty slow stablecoin adoption? Maybe. But Nigerians don’t only use stablecoins because they are cheap. They were adopted because they were faster, more accessible and often the only viable alternative. One final observation is that taxes being remitted in the original digital asset means the government may soon launch a digital asset treasury to manage these tokens.

For now, it has issued a new bill to stablecoin users.

Nnanna writes Fintech Is Easy, an independent fintech research and strategy publication covering the business of moving money into, out of and across Africa.

The views expressed here are the author’s own and should not be considered tax, legal or financial advice. Please consult qualified professionals where appropriate.

Edited by: Kolawole Omobusola

#SD 9: Plot Twist: Regulation Might Be Stablecoins' Biggest Ally

Ernest Bosha — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 16:02:11 GMT

If you’ve ever watched a really good TV show, you’ll know every great episode has two stories. There’s the A-story that everyone is watching. It’s where the big action happens, the major decisions are made, and the main characters either win, lose, or leave you hanging until the next episode.

Then there’s the B-story. It’s quieter. Easy to overlook. But more often than not, it’s the one that quietly shapes what happens next. That’s exactly what’s happening in the stablecoin world right now. Over the past few weeks, the A-story has been impossible to miss. From partnership announcements to product launches, fresh funding rounds, and new players entering the race, every day seems to bring another headline about stablecoins gaining momentum.

But while everyone’s been watching that unfold, a far more consequential B-story has been playing out in the background: regulation. At first glance, it might look like regulators are stepping in to slow the industry’s momentum. But that’s probably the wrong way to read it. What’s really happening is that stablecoins are being pulled out of the regulatory grey zone and into the mainstream financial system. And with that come clearer rules, stronger safeguards, greater accountability, and ultimately, more legitimacy for everyone involved.

The EU’s MiCA Deadline as a Filtration Mechanism

On July 1, 2026, the EU’s MiCA transitional period closed. From that date, any crypto-asset service provider (CASP) without a MiCA licence had to begin an orderly winddown of EU services or face fines of up to €5 million for individuals and 12.5% of annual turnover for firms.

Before July 1, roughly 1,200 to 3,000 firms were operating under national registrations. But only around 300 currently hold a valid CASP authorisation. Even Binance, the world’s largest exchange, withdrew its Greek licence application days before the deadline and suspended new sign-ups to refile elsewhere, leaving over 40 million users worrying about their status.

That sharp contraction in the number of operators is a sorting mechanism to ensure only compliant operators continue to grow and gain market share. Roughly 70% of EU crypto transactions now occur on MiCA-compliant exchanges, a share that will rise as unlicensed platforms exit the market.

For Euro-denominated stablecoins like Circle’s EURC and Banking Circle’s EURI, this is a boon. A single passport valid across 27 member states is a genuine competitive asset once you hold it. The firms that survive the shake-up emerge with a credibility signal that unlicensed operators can never buy, which is exactly why banks and institutional counterparties are more willing to work with them.

Conversely, Tether’s USDT was progressively delisted from EEA spot markets over the past year due to its decision not to apply for a license. This may explain Tether’s spree of partnerships with African operators like LemFi, Shiga, Kotani Pay, Busha and others as it seeks distribution into new markets.

The takeaway for the African stablecoin ecosystem is that regulatory actions now have global spillover effects and positioning to take advantage of these should be an active part of their strategy.

What the GENIUS and CLARITY Acts Bring

In the US, federal regulators missed the GENIUS Act’s 18 July deadline to finalise implementing rules on reserve assets, custody, redemption, and AML compliance for stablecoin issuers.

The statutory compliance deadline of January 2027 has not moved, so issuers are now building compliance programmes against proposed rules that could still change, with BlackRock lobbying the OCC to loosen the proposed cap on tokenised reserve assets.

A few years ago, BlackRock advocating for digital asset regulation would be unthinkable because many clients weren’t interested in Bitcoin and similar assets. But since the signing of the GENIUS Act in July 2025, the global stablecoin market cap has grown to over $320 billion, up from $259.7 billion.

Notably, this growth occurred without final rules: the GENIUS Act reached its first anniversary in July 2026, with no final rules published by regulators, and full regulatory effect now shifts to January 18, 2027. So, the “impact” so far is mostly the signalling effect of legal certainty (institutional confidence, bank/payments-firm entry) rather than enforced supervision, which has brought many institutional operators into the ecosystem.

Similarly, the Senate Banking Committee advanced the Digital Asset Market CLARITY Act in May, assigning payment stablecoins to banking regulators under the GENIUS Act framework, banning passive yield on digital wallets while permitting transaction-based rewards, and requiring digital commodities to be treated as customer property rather than unsecured claims in a bankruptcy.

This is already shaping how issuers structure products, operations, and partnerships, as the direction of travel is now clear enough that building ahead of the final regulation carries less risk than waiting for it.

Africa’s Compliance Bar Is Rising and So Is the Ambition of Its Operators

Across the continent, a slew of laws, orders and regulations have been passed over the last six months. In recent weeks, Nigeria and Kenya have moved towards implementation in different ways. Nigeria’s President signed an Executive Order on Virtual Assets Coordination on 17 July. The government is creating a CBN-chaired Virtual Asset Council to harmonise a regulatory landscape it describes as fragmented across tax, securities, and financial-stability mandates.

The new framework would complement the Investment and Securities Act 2025, which was arguably the biggest crypto-friendly move in Nigeria. For a $92 billion stablecoin market, this level of order, notwithstanding concerns around regulatory efforts duplication, recognises the significant shift of digital assets from speculative interest to institutional payment infrastructure.

In Kenya, the gazetted Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs) Regulations 2026 set a paid-up capital floor of KSh300 million (about $2.3 million) for stablecoin issuers. It also prohibits stablecoin issuers from paying interest, and gives every operator already active in the market, including Luno, Busha, Kotani Pay, and Binance, until 4 November to secure a licence.

Separately, new VASP rules now let investigators seize crypto wallets, seed phrases, and hardware devices and convert frozen assets into fiat to preserve their value during investigations. The Central Bank of Kenya and Capital Markets Authority split supervision between fiat conversion and stablecoin issuance on one hand, and exchanges, tokenisation, and ICOs, on the other. This brings crypto firms toward the governance standards long applied to banks: independent directors, cybersecurity audits, and seven-year record retention.

In the past, global standard-setters like the IMF and FATF have flagged the risks of a lack of regulatory clarity, leading to the development of grey market operations with the attendant AML/CFT challenges.

Recent regulatory efforts like the ones above have led to countries like Nigeria and South Africa exiting the FATF grey list. The benefits to operators include lower cost of capital and reduced friction as they no longer face enhanced due diligence requirements from correspondent banks and counterparties, which normally drive up transaction costs and slow settlement times across corridors.

Moreover, this new generation of rules harmonising globally makes stablecoins usable by the banks, trade financiers, and remittance corridors that regulatory uncertainty has kept on the sidelines until now.

💡 KEY INSIGHT

Every market in this edition is tightening the rules around stablecoins, but not for the same reasons. Nigeria is focused on monetary sovereignty and attracting the right kind of investment. Kenya is doubling down on AML compliance. The EU is protecting market integrity, while the US is prioritising financial stability. Every new law, licensing regime, sandbox, or compliance deadline forces the market to sort itself out. Unlicensed, undercapitalised, or opaque operators either adapt or disappear.

Those that make it through don’t just earn regulatory approval; they earn something even more valuable: credibility. And in today’s financial system, credibility is currency. It opens doors to banking partners, institutional capital, and cross-border opportunities that the industry’s early, lightly regulated days simply couldn’t offer. So while regulation may feel like a short-term speed bump, it’s increasingly proving to be the infrastructure that will support stablecoins’ long-term adoption.

What Comes Next?

Four dates now anchor the next phase of stablecoin regulation, and each is worth tracking for what it reveals about enforcement capacity as much as policy intent.

● 4 November 2026: Kenya’s licensing deadline arrives against a process that has issued zero licences to date, the first real test of whether a regulator can build a licensed market from nothing in three months.

● 18 January 2027: The GENIUS Act’s compliance deadline in the US, which will land with or without finalised implementing rules from the Treasury, OCC, FDIC, Fed, and NCUA.

● 25 October 2027: The UK’s cryptoasset regime expands to its full scope, giving firms roughly 16 months from the June policy statements to prepare authorisation applications.

● May / June 2027: First reporting deadlines and automatic cross-border data exchanges between participating global tax authorities for the Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework (CARF); an international tax transparency standard created by the OECD to automate the collection and exchange of cryptocurrency transaction data.

● Ongoing: Nigeria’s Virtual Asset Council begins the harder work of turning a coordination mandate into practice across the CBN, SEC, and tax authorities.

None of these deadlines guarantees a smooth outcome. Kenya’s own capital floor could still push builders elsewhere, MiCA’s authorisation backlog could take until 2027 to clear, and the GENIUS Act’s final rules could still surprise issuers who built to the proposed version.

However, the direction across every market covered here shows regulators have moved from asking whether to bring stablecoins into the perimeter, only how quickly and in what way.

Edited by: Kolawole Omobusola

#13: Nigeria has a Banking License Problem

Elizabeth Ajao — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 16:16:06 GMT

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Hello Builder 👋,

On the very first day of July, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) served the ecosystem an interesting kind of breakfast: the revocation of 46 Microfinance Bank (MFB) licences.

One name on the list that immediately caught my attention was the microfinance bank acquired by Sycamore, one of Nigeria’s fast-growing digital lenders. The acquisition had followed a broader trend from the last few years: fintechs acquiring microfinance banks to unlock deposits, lending, and other banking capabilities.

By the way, if you missed our last email, here’s a reminder that the referral campaign is on, and the leaderboard is heating up. Do you want to be among the two winners of our cool merch in the next three weeks? All you have to do is spread the gospel of this newsletter to your friends, co-founders, CEOs, and everyone you know in tech.

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Now, back to the conversation…

Seeing this new revocation list raised serious questions. Why does the CBN keep revoking banking licences? Why are microfinance banks almost always at the centre of these clean-ups? And after years of issuing and withdrawing licences, is Nigeria building a stronger financial system, or simply repeating the same cycle of revoking licenses year-on-year?

Those questions sent me down a rabbit hole. I looked through CBN circulars of historical licence revocations, and even compared Nigeria’s approach with other African markets. What I found tells the story of a financial system that may have become better at issuing licences than building institutions.

The Pattern Didn’t Start This Month

The July announcement wasn’t an isolated event. It was just the latest chapter in a regulatory pattern that has unfolded over the past few years. Since 2023, the CBN has revoked the licences of 233 financial institutions across different categories:

Of the 233 licences revoked between 2023 and 2026, 225 belonged to Microfinance Banks (MFBs). That’s 96.6% of all licence revocations. Why do MFBs account for almost every major licence revocation?

The CBN's reasons for revoking licences have remained consistent across the years. Institutions typically lose their licences because they:

Fail to maintain minimum regulatory and capital requirements;
Stop carrying out the activities they were licensed to perform;
Repeatedly fail to comply with regulatory obligations;
Experience governance and financial weaknesses that threaten their continued operation.

While these reasons explain why licences are revoked. They don’t explain why the same category of institutions keeps appearing on the list.

Why Are MFBs at The Forefront?

Microfinance banks were created to solve one of Nigeria’s biggest financial challenges: bringing banking services to people traditional commercial banks often overlook. It’s a critical role yet also one of the hardest business models in banking.

Unlike commercial banks, MFBs lend to customers with limited credit histories, serve smaller businesses, operate on thinner margins, and still carry many of the same compliance, governance, and technology costs as much larger institutions. They also have fewer capital buffers when economic conditions deteriorate.

The irony is that these same institutions have become some of the most valuable assets in Nigerian fintech. Rather than applying for new banking licences, many fintechs now acquire existing MFBs to gain faster access to deposits, lending, and regulated banking infrastructure. Sycamore’s acquisition of an MFB was one example of that strategy.

But owning a banking licence and building a sustainable bank are two very different things. A licence gives an institution permission to operate. It doesn’t guarantee that the institution can survive. That distinction becomes even more interesting when you consider the size of Nigeria’s microfinance sector.

Nigeria has one of Africa’s largest microfinance banking sectors. Actually well deserving for a country of over 200 million people. The CBN’s last published register listed 882 licensed Microfinance Banks as at 2021. Yet between 2023 and 2026 alone, 225 MFB licences were revoked.

The issue isn’t necessarily that Nigeria has too many Microfinance Banks. Nigeria’s population exceeds 230 million people, and despite significant progress, 26% of adults remain financially excluded. The country still needs institutions capable of serving rural communities, informal businesses, and low-income households.

The bigger concern is whether we’ve focused too much on expanding the number of licensed institutions and not enough on institution building. Financial inclusion depends on reaching more people, but it also depends on having institutions that are well-capitalised, well-governed, and resilient enough to serve those communities over the long term.

A banking licence should be the beginning of the journey, not the destination. Behind it must sit enough capital, sound governance, robust technology, and disciplined risk management. Without those foundations, a licence becomes a certificate waiting to be revoked.

Ghana Faced the Same Question. It Chose a Different Answer.

Nigeria isn’t the first African country to face this challenge.

Between 2017 and 2019, the Bank of Ghana carried out one of the continent’s largest financial sector clean-ups, revoking the licences of over 400 financial institutions, including 347 microfinance institutions, 39 microcredit companies, 15 savings and loans companies, 8 finance houses, and 9 universal banks.

The rationale was similar: institutions that had become insolvent, undercapitalised, poorly governed, or unable to meet regulatory standards had to stop operations.

The difference was the approach. Rather than removing weak institutions in batches over several years, Ghana chose a comprehensive sector reset. Six years later, Ghana has not experienced another clean-up of that scale.

Nigeria appears to be taking a different path. Instead of one comprehensive restructuring, the CBN has repeatedly removed institutions in batches: 179 MFBs in 2023, Heritage Bank in 2024, another 46 MFBs this year.

That raises an important question.

Should Nigeria continue pruning weak institutions every few years, or is it time for a broader review of whether the current structure of the microfinance sector is sustainable?

In Other Words…

A healthy financial system shouldn’t be measured by the number of licences it issues. It should be measured by the number of institutions that remain safe, trusted, and resilient years after receiving those licences.

If the same category of institutions continues to dominate revocation lists, perhaps the next phase of financial inclusion is about building stronger institutions.

The Big Take

Nigeria doesn’t need fewer financial institutions. It needs stronger ones.

Nigeria has spent years issuing licences, revoking licences, and repeating the cycle, particularly within the microfinance sector. That should force a broader conversation about the quality of institutions entering the market.

Financial inclusion should never be measured by the number of licences issued. It should be measured by the number of institutions that can still serve customers safely ten years later.

What This Means for Builders

If acquiring an MFB is part of your fintech growth strategy, remember that you’re buying much more than a licence. You’re inheriting its regulatory history, governance standards, compliance culture, technology stack, and operational risks.

Do deep due diligence. Ask even more questions.

And after that... maybe say a small prayer. 😄

Beth’s Corner

Ghana eventually concluded that gradual intervention wasn’t enough and reset its financial sector in one decisive exercise. I’m not saying Nigeria should copy Ghana exactly.

But I do think it’s time to ask whether we’re solving the problem, or simply managing it in instalments. In another 1/2 years, we might find the CBN publishing another long list of revoked MFB licences — and the cycle continues.

Does Nigeria need a one-off sector clean-up, or should the CBN continue with gradual licence revocations?

What is your own thought? I really want to know 👇🏽.

Leave a comment

Quick Data Drop

📌 Mobile money processed over $2 trillion in transactions globally in 2025, and has doubled since 2021. Most of the new growth came from Sub-Saharan Africa.

📌 M-Pesa now processes transactions worth more than half of Kenya’s GDP every year, making it one of the world’s most successful mobile money ecosystems. In 2024, M-Pesa processed KSh 40.24 trillion (about US$311 billion) in transactions.

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In Other News

Here’s what else caught my eye in June 👀:

Zedcrest just bought Leatherback. Remember when they led Leatherback’s $10 million pre-seed round in 2022? They’ve now gone from investor to owner. .
Digital lenders now have a new sheriff. After months of waiting on a court decision, Nigeria’s Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) can now resume enforcing its digital lending regulations . If you’re building in lending, this is one update you shouldn’t ignore.
🇰🇪 Kenya just made life harder for unlicensed loan apps. A Kenyan court ruled that unlicensed digital lenders cannot sue borrowers to recover loans. In simple terms: if you’re not licensed, don’t expect the courts to enforce your lending business.
🇳🇬 President Tinubu wants to unify Nigeria's virtual assets regulation.

Fintech Opportunities

These are the latest fintech jobs and opportunities that we’ve curated, so you don’t have to. Looking for a job in fintech? Shoot your shot at these roles:

By the way… here is another tech opportunity you shouldn’t miss.

Condia is hosting its flagship event tagged “The Borderless Experience” next month, and as a community partner, we’ve got discounted tickets for you.

This event brings industry professionals together to talk through cross-border trade, payments, commerce, and expansion across Africa. Get 20% off early-bird tickets and 10% off regular tickets with the code BIF26.

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Join Builders in Fintech (BIF)

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Do you want BIF merch?

Kolawole Omobusola — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 07:37:23 GMT

We hosted the first physical Builders in Fintech event “Fintech & Chill” in June, and the BIF merch was one of the major highlights.

People asked about it. Others sent us DMs asking if they could buy one. Some of you even tried to negotiate for it (respectfully and not so respectfully) 😅.

Now, we’re giving two people the chance to win it (for free) over the next two weeks.

Refer a friend

What’s the catch?

Refer at least 30 people to Builders in Fintech between now and the 20th of August, and you’ll have the chance to win exclusive BIF merch.

We expect tough competition, so don’t stop at 30 if you’ve got more builders in your corner.

Here are some tips:

Forward this to your fintech group chats.
Share your referral link.
Drag your founder friends to subscribe.
Bring your product manager on board.
Tell that friend who’s always saying, “I need to join a tech community.”

Remember that this referral campaign ends on the 20th August, and the merch isn’t sold anywhere. You either earn it or keep admiring it from our pictures 😉.

Now, click the button below and spread the word. See you on the leaderboard.

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#SD 8: The Jobs Africans Are Hiring Stablecoins For

Ernest Bosha — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 16:07:30 GMT

In 2022, Kay was concluding a freelance contract with a U.S. client and asked to be paid in USDT instead of routing the invoice through the usual international transfer.

He’d grown tired of losing income to hidden platform fees, bank charges, and an official exchange rate that meant the Naira landing in his account was always smaller than the dollar amount agreed.

According to him:

“It just did not make sense to spend all of that on the little money I was withdrawing.”

He further added that:

“The use case for me was simply to avoid being legally cheated by platform fees and exchange rates.”

For Kay, asking to be paid in USDT wasn’t a bet on the future of money, simply a way to stop losing his own.

That’s the kind of moment the Jobs-to-Be-Done theory is built to explain. Developed by the late Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen and popularised for product teams through Tony Ulwick’s outcome-driven innovation work, the framework argues that people don’t buy products — they “hire” them to make progress on something happening in their life.

Using this framework, a stablecoin’s real competition isn’t another stablecoin but the alternative system of bank transfers, a parallel-market forex dealer, or a payment platform quietly eating into a freelancer’s invoice.

For this edition, we spoke to some stablecoin users across Africa to understand what jobs they’re hiring stablecoins to do and how well the assets do them.

Job One: Help me get paid without losing time and money to the system

For Kay, the job started with cross-border freelance income and never really finished because what began as a workaround became his default way of transacting.

In 2026, he now receives his salary directly in USDT (the most popular digital dollar among Africans) via the Quidax Exchange. He also uses global platforms like Binance and Bybit for occasional rate comparisons.

There was nervousness early on:

“I had the theoretical knowledge, but because it wasn’t a familiar terrain, I was overly careful,” he says.

This was a vivid description of how he’d triple-check every character of a wallet address in the beginning to ensure he didn’t lose money to the irreversibility of crypto transactions.

Beth arrived at the same job from a different angle. According to her:

“My first-ever time owning a stablecoin was getting paid with it. It was the default payment method, so I had no choice, type of thing.”

Although she found usage confusing initially, she has grown comfortable with repeated use through Quidax and Binance.

Where the two diverge is in what the job is actually worth. Kay frames it almost entirely around what he avoids: bank fees, platform charges, an unfavourable official rate, and transfer costs as low as 1 USDT.

That tracks, as Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the world’s most expensive places to move money, averaging an 8.78% cost per $200 sent against a 6.49% global average.

He also points to speed: using cross-border bank transfers used to take three days to a week; now, with stablecoins, this takes seconds, down from the 30–40 minutes P2P trading used to take when Kay started a few years ago.

To Beth, holding USDT feels like holding dollars, and converting to Naira is simple, but the spread eats into the convenience. Her instinct is common: a BVNK-Coinbase-Artemis survey found 95% of Nigerian crypto users would rather be paid in stablecoins than Naira, a rational response to FX shortages and currency volatility across much of the continent.

Job Two: I need to hedge against value erosion and reach markets my local currency can’t touch.

Phil’s first stablecoin transaction wasn’t really about stablecoins. It was 2017, Ripple’s XRP was having its moment, and the only way in was through an over-the-counter dealer called Naira X, since almost no platforms traded in Naira pairs then.

The process was entirely manual: email your proof of payment, hand over a wallet address, and wait.

While explaining the process, he said:

“You go via email, send them the screenshot that you’ve made the transfer, the evidence of payment, the amount, and then you add your wallet address.”

But, there was no recourse if it went wrong. He says:

“I was literally banking on hope that they wouldn’t take my money and go.”

The job that started as a way into a speculative trade has settled into something else: a hedge and a gateway.

“USDT is basically a hedge for me, my gateway to creating or storing wealth, my gateway to the global financial market.”

Phil holds stablecoins because they do something the Naira structurally can’t: preserve value and open access to dollar-priced markets.

That the rationale transformed to “hedging” is worth noting for operators. It proves that user motives shift over a product’s lifecycle, and reading a long-term holder’s current explanation as their original one is a mistake.

What’s changed most for Phil is the ease of access.

According to him:

“The difference is so glaring. I no longer have to send an email with payment proof to some guy and just hope to God.”

Where the earlier job ran on trust in a stranger, it now runs on infrastructure, an exchange, and settlement in the blink of an eye.

That mirrors the sector’s growth from a time when a network of informal dealers and unlicensed exchanges controlled the markets to a period when it’s now one of the fastest-growing stablecoin markets globally.

Phil’s concerns are structural rather than transactional. Depegging risk is real: what happens to a dollar-pegged asset if the dollar stops being the reserve currency of choice?

There’s also no equivalent of deposit insurance for long-term holders, and the irreversibility of stablecoin transactions is a big challenge.

Phil says:“

If I send stablecoin to a wallet, and even a letter is missing from that address, it cannot be reversed. In traditional finance, if I send funds to the wrong place, I can get my money back. In stablecoins, it just doesn’t apply.”

That’s the same fear Kay described while learning to use cryptocurrencies and having to “check every letter and number in his wallet address.” As the ecosystem has matured with improved regulatory clarity, recourse mechanisms are now required on regulated crypto platforms.

How Jobs Done Create New Jobs

Solving one job well tends to expose the next. For Beth, converting USDT to USD through Naira left her with noticeably less than expected, a loss from compounding conversion costs rather than any single bad transaction.

She said, “I wish I could just pay for stuff I buy directly with USDT. That would be so cool.” That’s where stablecoin usage across Africa usually meets reality.

Turning stablecoin value into something a merchant in Nairobi or Accra can accept requires bridging blockchain rails to mobile money and agent networks. Startups like KotaniPay, which connects stablecoin rails to M-Pesa and Airtel Money, and Accrue, a USD-stablecoin agent network spanning more than a dozen African countries, are building to close that gap.

Kay further mentioned a friction that sits outside the transaction entirely: getting paid in stablecoins can make it harder to access loans. African lenders still largely underwrite consumer credit against domestic currency salaries or deposits.

While sharing that pain point, he says:

“Many traditional lenders still shy away from offering credit facilities to cryptocurrency earners. If your salary is not paid in Naira, they will most likely not offer you anything.”

Solving the payments problem, in other words, quietly created a credit problem.

Venture firm a16z has flagged credit as one of the next growth areas for stablecoins once the payments infrastructure matures, and some African operators are already moving in this direction.

Busha, one of Nigeria’s licensed digital asset platforms, added crypto-backed loans to its stack this year: offering up to 50% loan-to-value against Bitcoin and Solana holdings, at 2% monthly interest, without requiring users to sell their crypto holdings.

It’s a structurally different answer to Kay’s challenge of getting banks to recognise crypto income and more lenders to underwrite a stablecoin salary the way they would a Naira one.

With the Busha structure, borrowers’ crypto holdings become collateral. For Kay and earners like him, the hope is that as regulation matures and institutional adoption grows, more operators build credit products around the assets people transact or get paid in, rather than waiting for legacy underwriting to catch up.

What’s Next?

Kay, Beth, and Phil describe the stablecoin leg of their transactions as reliable. Any failings they have experienced in using stablecoins have been market-based and structural rather than technical.

Stablecoins, on the evidence of these users, have already done the job they were originally hired for. The new jobs of last-mile acceptance, credit, and insurance against their own structural risks present new opportunities for African stablecoin operators.

Stay tuned for the next edition of Stablecoin Digest, a Builders in Fintech Column.

Edited by: Kolawole Omobusola

#SD 7: How African Stablecoin Operators Are Building Global Trust

Ernest Bosha — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 16:05:02 GMT

For most of its short history, Africa’s stablecoin story has been driven by demand. A trader in Accra holds USDT to hedge a weakening cedi. An importer in Nairobi settles cross-border invoices without the cost and delays of correspondent banking. According to Yellow Card, stablecoins now account for 43% of cryptocurrency transaction volume in Sub-Saharan Africa, showing that demand is already established across the region.

This edition moves beyond the demand story to examine what comes next. As demand becomes established, this week’s developments suggest that institutional credibility is becoming the next competitive advantage.

The Week’s Moves: Two Operators, One Direction

This past week produced two headline developments that, on their own, look like routine business news. Together, they reveal where the market is headed.

Yellow Card secured Swiss regulatory approval. On June 23, Yellow Card announced it had obtained AML affiliation in Switzerland as a supervised financial intermediary, establishing a permanent base in Lugano. The approval gives institutional and corporate clients a single regulated counterparty through which they can access Yellow Card’s stablecoin infrastructure across its operating markets, instead of navigating licences across more than 50 markets. It is another step in the company’s shift towards B2B infrastructure.
Ripple took an equity stake in Flutterwave. On June 16, Flutterwave announced a strategic investment from Ripple as part of its Series E round, valuing the company at $3.2 billion. The deal embeds Ripple’s NYDFS-approved RLUSD stablecoin and the XRP Ledger into Flutterwave’s payment infrastructure, with Nigeria as the first market. Flutterwave has processed more than $50 billion across one billion transactions, giving RLUSD a distribution network it could not have built on its own. For Flutterwave, the partnership also strengthens its institutional credentials through Ripple’s regulatory standing in the US and Europe.

Yellow Card in Lugano: What the Swiss Move Actually Signals

Seven months ago, Yellow Card made a decision that raised eyebrows. As TechCabal reported in November 2025, the company shut down its retail trading app to focus entirely on B2B infrastructure. That decision now makes sense. Yellow Card recently revealed that 99% of its business is in stablecoins, with enterprise use cases such as treasury management, cross-border payments, and supplier settlements driving most of its transaction volume.

The Swiss regulatory approval is the next step in that strategy. It gives institutional customers a single regulated counterparty through which they can access Yellow Card’s operations across Africa. The choice of Lugano is also strategic. The city has positioned itself as a global hub for digital financial infrastructure with initiatives like Plan ₿ through its Tether partnership, and last year’s CHF100 million blockchain bond issuance. As Nigerian fintech operators know too well, supportive regulation matters.

Regulatory credibility and operational reach are two different value propositions. Yellow Card is positioning itself as one of the few African operators that can offer both. For global institutions looking at African stablecoin infrastructure, that removes one of the biggest barriers to engagement. The Swiss approval removes one of the last structural objections a compliance officer at a G-SIB Tier 1 bank would raise before engaging.

Ripple and Flutterwave: The Distribution Problem, Solved

To understand the Ripple–Flutterwave deal, start with RLUSD’s challenge. Ripple’s stablecoin is NYDFS-approved, fully fiat-backed, and backed by a level of regulatory credibility that USDT (the dominant stablecoin in Africa, accounting for about 85% of transactions) does not have. But regulatory credibility without distribution is not enough. USDT’s advantage has never been regulation; it has been network effects. Merchants accept it, platforms support it, and users already hold it.

Flutterwave solves that distribution problem almost overnight. The company has processed more than $50 billion across one billion transactions, raised over $500 million, and already operates payment and remittance infrastructure across the continent. More importantly, it has spent the past year building a stablecoin-native stack through partnerships with Polygon (October 2025), Circle’s Payment Network, Kulipa - for its issued stablecoin cards (April 2026), and Tempo for its settlement layer (June 4, 2026).

Based on their official announcement, the partnership is built on three pillars:

RLUSD is embedded into Flutterwave’s payment rails and Send App’s remittance corridors as a primary settlement asset.
The XRP Ledger for faster settlement on cross-border payment corridors.
A unified API connecting Flutterwave’s domestic network with Ripple Payments, allowing RLUSD to operate within existing merchant and remittance workflows rather than through a separate crypto stack.

What This Means for the Ecosystem

The two developments point to a broader shift that has been building over the past 18 months: Africa’s leading stablecoin operators are moving from proving that stablecoin rails work to proving they can be trusted by global institutions.

The timing matters. South Africa’s SARB has classified stablecoins as an emerging financial stability risk, while the IMF has raised concerns about monetary sovereignty and financial integrity in Nigeria. At the same time, global stablecoin transaction volumes reached $28 trillion in 2025. Stablecoin infrastructure is no longer peripheral to finance, and the institutions entering the market expect compliance standards that domestic-only operators cannot easily meet.

This creates three implications worth watching.

For operators, regulatory credibility is becoming a competitive advantage. Frameworks like Switzerland’s and MiCA are becoming the benchmark for attracting Tier 1 bank partnerships, multinational treasury business, and institutional settlement flows. Yellow Card has moved first in Africa. Others will likely follow, or risk missing the institutional market.

For stablecoin issuers, the Flutterwave deal shows what distribution in Africa really requires: deep integration into existing payment infrastructure, not another consumer app. RLUSD needed Flutterwave’s distribution more than Flutterwave needed RLUSD. That says a great deal about where leverage sits in Africa’s stablecoin market.

For regulators, the message is clear. Leading operators are not waiting for domestic stablecoin frameworks to emerge. They are building credibility through international licences and jurisdictions with established rules. With Africa’s cross-border payments market projected to reach $1 trillion by 2035, the question is no longer whether regulation is needed, but who will shape it. As argued in Stablecoin Digest 2, a coordinated continental framework, or collaboration between regulators across key payment corridors, would be the most effective path. Such a framework should prioritise reserve transparency, embedded supervision, and strong AML/CFT standards, while drawing on established regimes like MiCA, the FCA, and the US GENIUS Act.

What’s Next?

The pattern established this week is becoming clear. African operators are building upstream towards institutional trust, while global issuers are building downstream into African distribution. Together, they point to the next phase of Africa’s stablecoin market.

The operators that build institutional credibility first will be best placed to attract capital, partnerships, and global payment flows. And the regulators that engage now, while the market is still taking shape, will have greater influence over the standards that define it.

Stay tuned for the next edition of Stablecoin Digest, a Builders in Fintech column.

Edited by: Elizabeth Ajao

#12: How the New NIMC Act Could Change Nigerian Fintech

Kolawole Omobusola — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 15:01:20 GMT

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Hello Builder 👋,

What’s the last important thing you signed up for? A bank account? A new SIM? An international passport? A brokerage account? Maybe even a loan?

I’m willing to bet your NIN was required at some point. While many of us still think of it as “that number the government keeps asking for,” I don’t think that’s what it is anymore.

Last week, President Tinubu signed the new NIMC Act into law, replacing legislation that had existed since 2007. Most of the headlines focused on tougher penalties, such as identity theft, which now attracts up to 5 years in prison, increased fines, and how multiple registrations are now very serious issues.

But honestly, I think we’re all looking at the wrong headline because this isn’t really about your NIN, but what Nigeria is quietly trying to build around it.

Before We Start…

If you’ve been wondering why there was no #InsideFintech from us last week, I promise we didn’t ghost you. We took a short break because the BIF team was busy putting together Fintech & Chill, and we wanted to give everyone who couldn’t make it a chance to catch up on the conversations and highlights before we dropped another edition.

It was an afternoon of honest conversations. Founders unpacked hard lessons, operators shared the realities of actually building, and strangers left with new connections. Many people said “BIF should definitely do this again,” but for now, here are a few moments we captured from the day.

By the way, are you saving to buy a phone or gadget? What if you don’t need to save or wait for months to get that device or other items on your wishlist?

For example, you can get the most powerful Vivo V70 phone with just a 20% down payment and spread the rest using Credit Direct Checkout 👇.

Check Your Limit

Now that the housekeeping is over, let’s talk about why Nigeria’s new identity law isn’t really about your NIN.

#1: Your Identity Is Becoming More Valuable Than Ever

One thing I’ve realised is that the more digital our lives become, the more valuable a trusted identity becomes. Think about it. Your identity already unlocks banking, telecoms, healthcare, investment, pensions, taxes, education, credit, and virtually everything else you do digitally.

Now imagine proving who you are once and being able to securely reuse that identity across multiple services instead of repeating the same onboarding process over and over again. That’s the future this law is trying to support.

But here’s the trade-off. When one identity unlocks almost everything, protecting that identity becomes just as important as creating it. That’s probably why the law places so much emphasis and introduces stricter provisions on identity theft, impersonation, unlawful disclosure, and stronger penalties. It’s not that the government suddenly became obsessed with punishment, but because the country’s trust infrastructure is becoming more valuable.

#2: Fintechs Won’t Just Verify Identity Anymore. They’ll Build Around It.

Now let’s talk about builders. Today, almost every fintech spends time and money answering one basic question: “Is this person really who they claim to be?”

However, because it is repetitive and every company has unique verification workflows, the process is expensive. Great identity systems don’t ask you to prove yourself every five minutes. The new Act opens the door to a future where identity isn’t repeatedly rebuilt by every fintech, but it becomes a shared national infrastructure.

If that happens, onboarding could become:

Faster
Cheaper
More secure
More interoperable

Which means builders can spend less time proving identities and more time building fintech products people actually care about. That’s a much better use of engineering time.

#3: The Real Product Is Trust

I’ve noticed something interesting over the past few months. Every major fintech conversation somehow ends up coming back to infrastructure. A few weeks ago, our Stablecoin Digest piece talked about stablecoins becoming everyday money. Then we asked whether stablecoin adoption was growing faster than the guardrails around it.

Last month, we explored why African fintech needed stronger talent infrastructure. Now, we’re talking about identity.

Although the stories are different, there’s a clear pattern showing that the products getting all the attention are changing. But underneath them, the invisible layers are becoming the most important part of the ecosystem — from payments to identity, authentication, fraud prevention, and digital trust.

Nobody downloads an app because it has great identity infrastructure. They download it because it works. Identity is simply what makes “it works” possible.

In Other Words…

The biggest fintech opportunities over the next decade may not come from building another wallet, payments app, or lending platform. They may be designed from building products on top of a trusted digital infrastructure.

Because once identity becomes portable, reusable, and trusted, entirely new categories of financial products become possible — and that’s the exciting part.

The Big Take

For years, fintech companies treated identity as a compliance requirement. They collect an NIN, run KYC, verify the customer, and move on. The new NIMC Act suggests Nigeria is thinking much bigger than that.

Identity is no longer just something you verify. It’s becoming infrastructure. If payments became the rails that move money, identity is slowly becoming the rails that move trust. And without trust, the rest of the digital economy doesn’t work.

What Does This Mean for Builders?

If you’re building fintech today, identity shouldn’t move from under “KYC” and sit within your product. Because the companies that win won’t simply verify users better, but build experiences around trusted identity.

You start thinking beyond KYC to competitive features like:

Passwordless authentication
Consent management
Digital signatures
Reusable identity
Fraud intelligence
Cross-platform trust

Ultimately, these will likely offer your product an edge over your competitors.

Beth’s Corner

Of course, I always have a take. This time, it’s that everybody wants faster onboarding, but nobody wants weaker verification.

Everybody wants seamless digital experiences, while nobody wants identity fraud. The challenge isn’t choosing one over the other, but figuring out how to build both.

And honestly, I think that’s the conversation Nigeria should be having right now—not whether NIN is being linked to “too many things.”

What is your own thought? Tell me 👇🏽

Leave a comment

Quick Data Drop

📌 Over 120 million Nigerians have enrolled for the National Identification Number (NIN), making it one of Africa’s largest digital identity programmes.

📌 The legislation aligns Nigeria’s identity framework with the Nigeria Data Protection Act, strengthening privacy obligations alongside identity management.

📌 Nigeria’s digital identity programme is backed by a $430 million Identification for Development (ID4D) initiative, reflecting how strategic digital identity has become for financial inclusion and economic growth.

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In Other News

Here’s what else caught my eye in June:

The Central Bank of Nigeria revoked the licenses of 46 microfinance banks. Check the full list here.
Ajua announced it acquired Kenya’s WayaWaya, but five years later, WayaWaya is saying it never happened.
Ripple invested in Flutterwave to accelerate stablecoin expansion across the continent

Before I Go, Let’s Talk

Do you think Nigeria is building the right digital identity infrastructure, or do you worry we’re centralising too much trust in one system? Where do you think the line should be?

Reply & Tell Me 👇🏽

Leave a comment

Fintech Opportunities

These are the latest fintech jobs and opportunities that we’ve curated, so you don’t have to. Looking for a job in fintech? Shoot your shot at these roles:

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That’s All, Builder

For years, Nigerian fintech has focused on moving money faster. The next chapter may be about moving trust just as efficiently.

Nigeria’s new NIMC Act is one attempt to answer that. However, whether it succeeds won’t depend on the law alone, but also on whether we build enough trust around the infrastructure it’s trying to create.

If this newsletter made you think, tap the ❤️icon and: Forward This to Someone in Fintech👇🏽:

#SD 6: Are Stablecoins Growing Too Fast?

Ernest Bosha — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 15:02:09 GMT

As funding, product launches, and partnerships outpace guardrails, a call for caution.

This edition steps back from “why” stablecoins are spreading in Africa to ask a harder question: what happens when a financial instrument grows this fast, this publicly, and this close to people’s everyday money? It’s a familiar pattern to anyone who has watched an asset class fall in love with itself. The question is whether Africa’s stablecoin ecosystem can avoid the worst version of that story.

The Pattern of Growth: Capital and Enthusiasm Are Moving Faster Than the Rails Can Settle

The last few weeks have produced one funding or partnership announcement after another, often from the same handful of companies, often within days of each other.

Tether funded a remittance platform: On 18 May 2026, Tether invested in LemFi. The deal embeds USDT as a settlement layer across LemFi’s corridors, replacing multi-day SWIFT chains with near-instant transfers. Days later, LemFi closed a $30 million Series B extension, pushing its total raised past $85 million since 2021.
Paga ran two plays in five weeks: On 8 May, Paga partnered with the Sui blockchain to put its $1.5 billion in monthly payment volume on a path to crypto-native settlement. On 10 June, it followed up with a bidirectional stablecoin bridge with Crossmint, wiring its local fiat on- and off-ramps directly into Crossmint’s enterprise payout network spanning 50+ blockchains.
Flutterwave has now made six stablecoin moves in eight months: After Polygon (October 2025), Turnkey/Nuvion merchant wallets (January 2026), Circle Payment Network membership, Kulipa stablecoin cards (April), and Tempo as a second settlement layer (4 June), Ripple has now taken an equity stake in Flutterwave’s Series E, a round valuing the company at roughly $3.2–3.3 billion. The CEO is forecasting at least a 30% jump in stablecoin volumes from the Ripple tie-up alone.
The stablecoin concentration: Excluding Paymentology’s $175 million round, African startups raised just $53 million in May 2026, of which around 70% came from three stablecoin infrastructure companies closing deals within the same week, including Tanzania’s Nala, securing $50 million in debt to expand its cross-border stablecoin rails.

The broader demand data backs the enthusiasm to an extent. The IMF’s new ‘Stablecoins in Nigeria’ report, published this week, shows that Nigeria received roughly $59 billion in crypto-asset inflows between July 2023 and June 2024 and now accounts for about 60% of all stablecoin inflows into sub-Saharan Africa since 2019.

Now, let’s get into the granular details.

Nigeria’s Stablecoin Flows Mirror Policy and Market Events

The primary drivers of the high stablecoin demand in Nigeria are domestic macroeconomic distortions, such as currency depreciation and policy changes. In addition, structural issues like the cost and time inefficiencies of remittance, international trade, and treasury management are constant sources of stablecoins’ demand.

From the chart, different events coincided with a surge in digital dollars among Nigerians. Could this be why the IMF warned in its report that Nigeria’s stablecoin boom is a huge risk for the naira?

However, the question is no longer whether the demand is real. Now, it’s whether growth is sustainable at this pace, and the gap between real demand and sustainable growth is exactly where some asset classes that boomed in the past have gone wrong.

When Enthusiasm Outruns Fundamentals: A Short History Lesson

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) frames the present stablecoin moment against a much older pattern, where periods of financial innovation attract more capital than the underlying risk controls can absorb. This echoes what economists like Irving Fisher and Hyman Minsky call the financial instability hypothesis: from euphoria to overextension, and then a reckoning.

Two historic crypto events show us this pattern:

Terra/UST in May 2022. An algorithmic stablecoin with no fiat backing, propped up by an unsustainable 20% yield product, reached a combined market value with its sister token LUNA of over $40 billion at its peak. When redemptions accelerated, the algorithm’s mint-and-burn mechanism turned into a death spiral. LUNA’s supply exploded from roughly 340 million tokens to over 6.5 trillion within days, and an estimated $40 billion in value evaporated in under a week.

Circle’s USDC in March 2023. This is the more uncomfortable example, because USDC was the “responsible” stablecoin, fiat-backed, regularly audited, issued by a regulated US company. When Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, Circle disclosed that $3.3 billion, roughly 8% of USDC’s reserves, was stuck at the failed bank.

The stablecoin fell to as low as $0.87 within hours. It recovered days later, but the episode proved that even fully disclosed, well-regulated stablecoins are exposed to risks entirely outside their own balance sheets, including the health of banking partners.

From the image above, we can also see the higher demand for USDT over USDC, which poses a concentration risk around Tether’s dominance of the stablecoin market in Nigeria and Africa, where it accounts for about 85% of transactions.

How This Could Happen Inside the Stablecoin Ecosystem Itself

There are really three distinct failure modes stablecoins carry, and African operators are now exposed to all three simultaneously.

Reserve and run risk, even with full backing. The IMF’s recent work on stablecoin stability applies the classic Diamond-Dybvig bank-run model to argue that any privately issued, redeemable instrument is vulnerable to runs once doubt creeps in about reserve quality, and that only central bank reserves truly meet the bar of being run-proof.
Tether’s case, where it was accused of lending at least $700 million of reserve assets to an affiliated trading platform, Bitfinex, is exactly the kind of yield-chasing behaviour that erodes the backing users assume is sitting untouched.
Interconnectedness with mainstream rails. This is the part that is genuinely new for Africa. When Paga wires stablecoin settlement into infrastructure already used by 300+ enterprise clients, including Meta and Qatar Airways, or Flutterwave embeds stablecoin balances across its products, processing 400 million transactions a year, events like a depeg, a frozen banking partner, or a bridge exploit no longer affect only crypto-native users.
It transmits directly into the payment rails that ordinary households and merchants now depend on for salaries, remittances, and everyday settlement. That is a materially different contagion risk than 2022’s crypto-native blowups, which mostly hurt people who had chosen to be exposed to crypto.
A monetary-sovereignty channel that needs no failure at all. The IMF’s Nigeria report flags a risk that doesn’t require anything to break: the widespread use of dollar-denominated stablecoins resembles a digital form of dollarisation, reducing demand for the naira and weakening the transmission of domestic monetary policy, while also pushing activity that once flowed through banks into less-visible digital wallets and exchanges.

Unrelated to the above, domestic stablecoins inherit local fragility rather than escape it. Nigeria’s cNGN and South Africa’s ZARU were built partly as answers to dollarisation, but critics note that cNGN currently lacks independent reserve audits, and a naira-pegged token is, by definition, only as stable as the naira itself, which has lost roughly 70% of its value since 2020.

The Rationale for Regulation

None of this is an argument against stablecoins, but a rationale for why the regulations and operations must scale with adoption. The core recommendation is proportionality. Registration and licensing should be the baseline for all stablecoins, with higher requirements for governance, resolution planning, and cross-border supervisory cooperation for assets, issuers, and providers that fall into “global stablecoin” territory.

The FSB’s ten principles for stablecoin arrangements follow the same logic: supervisors need real powers and resources, requirements should scale with risk rather than apply uniformly, and arrangements must demonstrate sufficient data and legal clarity before they launch.

The IMF explains why good regulation is genuinely hard rather than merely inconvenient. It requires issuers to back stablecoins with safe assets, which reduces run risk. However, safe assets also get lower yield, which squeezes issuer profitability and can shrink the very supply of stablecoins regulators want to keep useful.

Regulators will have to manage this trade-off depending on the outcomes they want.

For African regulators specifically, the IMF’s framing of Nigeria’s situation is the right way to think about the policy target. Stablecoins are neither a passing trend nor a full substitute for traditional finance; instead, they are a response to real frictions in cross-border payments.

The regulator’s job isn’t to suppress the workaround but to narrow the gap that made the workaround necessary in the first place, while keeping the new risks it introduces contained.

What Can the Ecosystem Do?

A few concrete commitments would move the needle faster than waiting for the next crisis to force them.

Treat reserve diversification as the standard, before hard lessons are learned. Circle’s response to the SVB episode, spreading reserves across multiple banking partners rather than concentrating exposure, should be the default posture for every issuer and orchestration platform now wiring stablecoins into African payment rails, not a fix applied only after a near-miss.

Move reserve attestation from monthly to continuous. USDC and Paxos already publish public auditor reports on their reserves. The BIS recommends an “embedded supervision” concept, arguing this process could be automated and made close to real-time using the same distributed ledgers stablecoins already run on, cutting both fraud risk and the compliance burden on operators simultaneously.

Keep asset segregation non-negotiable. The Tether-Bitfinex lending episode is the cautionary template every issuer operating in Africa should be measured against. Reserve assets backing a stablecoin should never be available to fund the issuer’s own balance sheet or an affiliated entity’s activities.

Build corridor-level supervisory cooperation while the rails are still being laid. LemFi, Paga, and Flutterwave are each wiring multiple jurisdictions together right now. Memoranda of understanding between regulators, and movement toward the kind of harmonised licensing the EU’s MiCA framework represents, are far cheaper to negotiate before volumes are high than after.

Hold domestic stablecoins to the same disclosure standard as dollar ones. If cNGN and ZARU are meant to be credible alternatives to USDT and USDC rather than just patriotic branding, they need the audited, transparent reserve backing that dollar stablecoins are increasingly expected to provide.

Make compliance the moat, not the cost. South Africa’s FSCA licensing regime, covered in Stablecoin Digest 2, already shows this is working. Over 300 approved licenses correlate with 7.8 million users on regulated exchanges, not fewer. Operators that get ahead of licensing and compliance now will be the ones still standing when the next crisis hits and tests everyone’s patience for digital asset products.

What’s Next?

The growth numbers in this edition are genuinely impressive, and the underlying demand, fueled by currency volatility, FX scarcity, and expensive remittances, is not going away.

But every crisis episode unfolds the same way: real utility, real enthusiasm, and capital arriving faster than anyone could verify what was actually backing it.

The difference between Africa’s stablecoin ecosystem maturing into durable infrastructure and becoming the next cautionary case study will be decided less by how fast the funding rounds close and more by whether reserve transparency, supervisory cooperation, and operator discipline can keep pace with the money.

Stay tuned for the next edition of Stablecoin Digest, a Builders in Fintech Column.

Edited by: Kolawole Omobusola

#SD 5: Who’s Driving Africa’s Stablecoin Adoption?

Ernest Bosha — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 15:16:27 GMT

Two editions ago, we talked about how Africans are using stablecoins for several purposes, including remittances, savings, business-to-business (B2B) trade, and corporate treasury. This edition will touch on the companies building the infrastructure that makes it all possible.

Reading the Map

The ecosystem map below reflects the methodology used by a16z to spotlight stablecoin operators across six infrastructure layers: three application layers, a banking layer, a last-mile layer, and a domestic stablecoin layer.

The map makes it clear that African stablecoin operators are not concentrated into a single offering or layer. They appear across the entire stack from licensed exchange infrastructure at the top to USSD-based last-mile settlement at the bottom.

Layer 1 - On/Off-Ramps: Where Fiat Meets the Chain

Every stablecoin transaction in Africa starts and ends with on/off-ramp activity. On/off-ramp providers are the licensed entities that make conversions between local currency and digital dollars possible. As such, they carry the heaviest regulatory burden.

Yellow Card is the most scaled African-founded operator in this layer. Licensed across 20 African countries, it processed $3 billion in annual transaction volume in 2024 (double its 2023 figure), after raising a $33M Series C led by Blockchain Capital.

In January 2026, it shut down its consumer app entirely to focus on B2B stablecoin infrastructure. That pivot was interpreted as a signal that enterprise demand is the market segment with the greatest potential for venture-scale growth.

Chipper Cash, another reputable brand in the ecosystem that has integrated Tether’s USDT settlement and Ripple USD (RLUSD) distribution to its 7 million customers across nine African markets.

South Africa’s VALR, backed by Pantera Capital’s $55M Series B, also listed RLUSD alongside digital asset exchanges like Quidax and Busha in Nigeria, as Ripple formalized its African distribution strategy.

Layer 2 - Orchestration: Moving Money Across Borders

On top of the ramps sits the orchestration layer. This includes companies that route payments across currencies and corridors for businesses, fintechs, and importers. They are the ones with most of the transaction volume, and at the forefront of stablecoin innovation in Africa.

A major player is Juicyway, which processed $1.3 billion in cross-border B2B payments before most people had heard of it. Its model connects liquidity pools for Naira, USD, GBP, and CAD through stablecoin rails, with FX price discovery powered by Naira Rates. It has since been selected by the CBN for an anti-money laundering and counter-financing terrorism (AML/CFT) compliance pilot alongside Flutterwave and Paystack.

Conduit, a US-headquartered, Africa-focused company with operations across Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa, took a different path. Its annualized transaction volume reached $10 billion in 2024, following a $36M Series A led by Dragonfly Capital. Its partnership with Onafriq enabled USDC settlement across 40+ African countries via mobile money rails.

Meanwhile, Flutterwave has embedded stablecoin rails into its existing infrastructure across 34 countries via a Polygon partnership. The African unicorn, alongside Yellow Card and Onafriq, were also the first African members of Circle’s institutional Payment Network.

Layer 3 - Liquidity: Funding the Machine

The a16z analysis identifies thin liquidity between stablecoins and local fiat currencies as the most critical unsolved problem globally. One African-founded company called MANSA is solving this problem from the supply side.

MANSA provides revolving stablecoin credit lines to payment companies by pre-funding settlement obligations, so their customers never experience delays. It raised $10M in February 2025, with Tether leading the equity component.

It underwrites real-time transaction data, not collateral, and has disbursed over $18 million in payments financed to its clients, with access to over $200 million in liquidity through its partner network.

Lemonade Payments, Open FX, and Onafriq are also active players in this layer.

Layer 4 - Last Mile: The Hardest Problem

This is where the stack meets reality. Converting stablecoin value into something a merchant or smallholder farmer can actually spend requires bridging blockchain rails to mobile money networks, USSD systems, and physical agent networks.

KotaniPay provides an API connecting stablecoin rails to M-Pesa, Airtel Money for both online activities and offline USSD transactions for users without internet access. It is registered as a Financial Service Provider in South Africa and received a strategic investment from Tether in 2025.

Paycrest, a Nigerian winner of the Base 2024 Global Onchain Summer Buildathon, takes a decentralised approach, using peer-to-peer (P2P) liquidity matching and smart contracts to convert stablecoins to fiat without a centralised intermediary.

In a different strategy, Accrue is building a physical USD stablecoin agent network in Nigeria, applying the same distribution logic that makes mobile money work.

Layer 5 - Banking: From Observer to Participant

As far as stablecoins are concerned, Africa’s banking sector has moved from observation to active participation in three distinct ways.

ABSA became Ripple’s first African institutional custody client in October 2025, while also providing reserve accounts for stablecoin issuers and launching a gold-backed stablecoin with Ripple.

Standard Bank is the reserve custodian for ZARU (ZAR Universal Network), South Africa’s first institutional-grade stablecoin pegged 1:1 to the South African Rand.

However, M-Pesa’s ADI Chain partnership, targeting stablecoin-to-wallet conversion for 60+ million monthly users across eight markets, is the stack’s biggest short-term test. If it works, every other market gets a template to adopt.

Layer 6 - Domestic Stablecoins: Local Currency on Chain

Nigeria’s cNGN, issued by WrappedCBDC through the Nigeria’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) authorization, has traded volumes over N182.2 billion ($133.2m).

Similarly, South Africa’s ZARU is currently focused only on institutional clients. As a domestic-currency stablecoin pegged to the ZAR, it addresses central banks’ concerns about dollarisation.

The Director General of SEC Nigeria has been explicit in expressing regulators’ expectations for domestic stablecoin issuers. According to him, “The ambition is for a Nigerian stablecoin to power trade from Dakar to Dar es Salaam.”

Whether cNGN integrates with PAPSS (Pan-African Payment and Settlement System) to enable this will be the defining infrastructure question for the future.

The Funding Behind the Stack

Institutional funding for digital asset and stablecoin providers on the continent shows that the most active startups in the ecosystem are well-capitalized. Nigerian Web3 startups raised $43M in 2025, double 2024’s figure, with 89% of that linked to stablecoin-based operators.

What the Stack Tells Us

There are three takeaways here:

The stack is global at infrastructure, African at application. Tether, Circle, and Ripple provide the instruments. African founders build the systems that make those instruments useful. That division is workable, but the Onafriq whitepaper warns that Africa must shape the technology, not merely consume it.
The OTC desk has quietly become structural. The Quidax/TechCabal OTC report documents energy companies and raw materials traders settling multi-million-dollar invoices via stablecoin desks. Global OTC stablecoin volumes grew 147% year-on-year in 2024.
The last mile is still the bottleneck. KotaniPay, Paycrest, Accrue, and M-Pesa’s ADI Chain integration all address the same problem: how do you deliver stablecoin value to someone with a feature phone and no bank account? The company that solves this at scale will define what mass adoption actually looks like.

What’s Next?

The Nigeria Stablecoin Summit in Lagos in July 2026 will be the first sector-wide policy conversation.

South Africa and Nigeria, both removed from the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) grey list in 2025, have the credibility to lead a continental stablecoin regulatory framework.

Whether they do, or whether 54 separate national frameworks impose 54 separate compliance burdens on the operators mapped above, will determine how much of the value created in this stack stays within Africa.

Stay tuned for the next edition of Stablecoin Digest, a Builders in Fintech Column.

#11: How Complicated is Nigeria’s Tech Talent Problem?

Kolawole Omobusola — Fri, 29 May 2026 15:31:08 GMT

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Hello Builder 👋,

Beth here again.

Unless you have been under a rock, you must have seen the heated debate about whether Nigeria has enough “global” tech talent. At this point, it feels like a conversation the ecosystem keeps recycling every few months.

Someone like Moniepoint’s CEO, Tosin Eniolorunda, says there aren’t enough qualified engineers. Another person says companies simply don’t want to train junior talent anymore or pay global salaries. Then someone else points out that Nigerians are literally working at global companies remotely, so how can there be a shortage? Everybody argues across the divide, then we move on.

But this time, something made the conversation more interesting. While people were still debating the problem, Moniepoint announced a ₦3 billion investment into innovation hubs across three Nigerian universities: OAU, UNN, and ABU.

And almost at the same time, reports surfaced that OPay, one of Nigeria’s leading fintechs, is preparing for an Initial Public Offering (IPO) in the United States at a possible $4 billion (₦5 trillion) valuation.

At surface level, the stories feel completely unrelated. One is about students, while the other is about Wall Street. But I think they’re describing the same thing: African fintech is entering a very different phase.

Now, let’s break down these conversations.

#1: The Talent Conversation Is Missing the Point

If you asked me, I’d say Nigeria doesn’t have a raw talent problem. The country has a talent infrastructure problem. If talent didn’t exist, global companies wouldn’t keep hiring Nigerian tech professionals, such as engineers, designers, and product managers, remotely. Foreign companies wouldn’t equally expand their products across the continent. So capability is not the issue, structure is. However, structure is much harder to build.

For years, the ecosystem has relied heavily on:

Self-taught developers
Poorly-funded bootcamps
Twitter communities
Tech hubs
and individual hustle

That model helped bootstrap African tech to the point where reports now acknowledge 3.8% annual growth in the talent pool.

But you cannot scale an industry forever on hustle culture, resilience, and self-taught brilliance. At some point, systems must be built. And honestly, Nigerian universities have spent years sitting outside the country’s tech boom despite producing many of the people currently powering it.

The ecosystem treated campuses like places people escape from before their “real” learning begins. That gap is finally starting to look expensive.

#2: Why Moniepoint’s Move is a Big Deal

This is why Moniepoint’s ₦3 billion university is a big deal. Some may say it was because of the backlash their CEO got after blaming “hookup and Yahoo culture” for the lack of talent. However, it shows the necessary mindset shift that is required to build a viable talent pipeline in Nigeria’s tech ecosystem.

A few years ago, fintech companies mostly focused on hiring talent. Now, some of them are starting to realise they may need to help produce the talent pipeline themselves. That’s ecosystem thinking, and it’s long overdue.

Because right now, many companies are just rotating talent from the same small pool of experienced operators. Then we complain that senior talent is hard to find when nobody is training the juniors.

#3: OPay is the Institutional “Forerunner”

Then there’s the OPay IPO conversation. This may seem unrelated, but it represents another side to the conversation: Africa’s tech growth.

A few years ago, the biggest flex in African tech was raising funds from venture capital (VC) folks. Now, we have unicorns preparing for investments potentially worth millions of dollars from global capital markets.

That changes the game entirely because such a company won’t scale properly without strong internal talent systems. So, while Moniepoint is investing in a future talent pipeline, OPay is potentially preparing a higher ceiling for these talents to operate in upon “maturity.”

See how they connect now? You’re welcome.

In Other Words…

African fintech may be entering the phase where building the ecosystem becomes just as important as building products. But truth be told, this new phase is harder.

Because building products can be accelerated, but systems are slower, less glamorous, less visible, and those involved must be ready to get their hands dirty.

Ultimately, ecosystems become limited by whatever they fail to build intentionally. Right now, talent infrastructure may be one of those things for Nigeria’s tech community.

The Big Take

For years, African tech was obsessed with proving itself. There were questions about whether startups could raise enough money, scale, survive regulation, and become profitable.

But now, those questions have been answered. A TechCabal report states that African startups raised over $700 million in Q1 2026 alone. Now, the conversation is moving beyond startup growth to institutional sustenance. And this is why we have all these debates about talents.

Tell Me I’m Wrong 👇🏽

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What Does This Mean for Builders?

If you’re building right now, this reality should influence your decisions. The strongest companies over the next decade may not be the ones with the best products, but those that can:

Train talent consistently
Preserve institutional knowledge
Build sustainable operating systems
Create ecosystems around themselves

The companies that last longest may look less like startups and more like institutions where people can build careers within the ecosystem.

Beth’s Corner

Now, to my slightly uncomfortable take. Many startups say they want senior talent, but very few want to invest seriously in producing it.

Everybody wants experienced hires, but are they really ready to become training grounds where experience is built? That is the problem and why there’s a big gap to close.

Let’s Discuss 👇🏽

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Quick Data Drop

Nigeria has 1,475 startups, representing 76% of all startups in Western Africa
The Nigerian tech ecosystem grew by 31.8% over the past year and is home to 4 unicorns.
African startups have raised about $20 billion in 7 years, but only a tiny fraction goes to building talent infrastructure.

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In Other News - Industry Updates

1. Zambia Says Yes to New Insurance Products

Zambia's Pensions and Insurance Authority (PIA) officially launched the country's first Insurance Regulatory Sandbox on Monday, February 23, 2026. The initiative establishes a controlled, supervised environment to test innovative insurance products and business models while prioritizing consumer protection.

2. Ghana Tracks Back on Mobile Money Fees

The Bank of Ghana suspends a planned 0.75% fee on wallet-to-bank mobile money transfers. The tariff, which was scheduled to take effect on June 1, 2026, was paused to allow for broader consultations with financial sector stakeholders after public concern.

3. Nairobi Overtakes Lagos in Venture Pull

According to the newly released Startup Ecosystem Report 2026, Kenya has officially surpassed Nigeria in attracting startup capital due to East Africa's current regulatory stability.

Before I Go, Let’s Talk

Do you think Nigeria actually has a tech talent shortage? Or are we finally confronting the consequences of not building enough systems that develop talent at scale?

Reply & Tell Me 👇🏽

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May Community Hour is Tomorrow!

Need a therapeutic session after the stress of building and solving problems this month? We’re opening the floor for you to let it all out during our next BIF Community Hour tomorrow, May 30, 2026.

Fintech Radar is Live!

Fintech Radar is up and running — a space to discover fintech startups across Africa.

If you’re building something worth spotlighting, you can fill out the form here.

New articles in the African Fintech Library

Cyber Threats to the Financial Sector in Africa
https://buildersinfintech.com/afl/article/cyber-threats-to-the-financial-sector-in-africa
The AML Mandate Clock is Ticking
https://buildersinfintech.com/afl/article/the-aml-mandate-clock-is-ticking

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#SD 4: The Stablecoin Sandwich Goes Mainstream

Ernest Bosha — Sun, 24 May 2026 15:03:18 GMT

At first glance, Tether’s investment in LemFi looks like another fintech funding announcement with undisclosed terms. But over the past 18 months, a clearer pattern has emerged across African fintech: global stablecoin issuers are increasingly backing remittance platforms, payment networks, and on/off-ramp providers.

Together, these moves point to the same conclusion: the stablecoin sandwich is becoming standard operating procedure for cross-border finance in Africa.

What Is the Stablecoin Sandwich?

In the stablecoin sandwich model, users convert local currency into a stablecoin at the entry point. The stablecoin moves across borders over blockchain rails, bypassing correspondent banks and SWIFT chains, before being converted back into local currency at the destination.

Fiat → Stablecoin → Settlement → Local Currency Payout

The “sandwich” sits in the middle: a blockchain-based dollar that moves in seconds, settles 24/7, and costs significantly less than traditional cross-border rails. The fiat (local currency) layers on both ends are what make the infrastructure invisible to users. Most customers never interact directly with USDT or USDC. They simply send and receive money through familiar apps, bank accounts, and mobile wallets.

Africa has become one of the clearest markets for this model because the structural incentives are strong. Currency devaluation continues to pressure households and businesses across the continent. Kenya’s shilling has depreciated by roughly 50% since 2021, while the naira, cedi, and birr have faced similar volatility. At the same time, traditional cross-border infrastructure remains slow, expensive, and fragmented. The stablecoin sandwich is increasingly emerging as the most practical workaround to those inefficiencies.

The Business Model in Detail

The stablecoin sandwich works because value is created and captured at multiple layers of the transaction stack.

The Entry Layer: On-ramp providers like KotaniPay, Yellow Card, and Quidax convert local currency into stablecoins for users and businesses. Revenue comes from FX spreads and conversion fees, while the moat is local distribution, regulatory licensing, and integration with domestic payment rails.
The Settlement Layer: Stablecoin issuers like Tether and Circle sit at the centre of the transaction flow. They earn yield on reserves while expanding distribution every time a new corridor partner joins the network. Tether’s investments in LemFi and KotaniPay are best understood as a distribution strategy, not just financial investment.
The Orchestration Layer: Platforms like Conduit, Juicyway, and LemFi manage routing, liquidity, compliance, and settlement across corridors. This is where pricing efficiency, liquidity management, and regulatory sophistication become competitive advantages.
The Exit Layer: Off-ramp providers convert stablecoins back into local currency through bank accounts, mobile wallets, and agent networks. Africa’s mobile money ecosystem already processes over $1.4 trillion annually, making it a natural distribution layer for stablecoin settlement.

The operators building advantages across multiple layers, combining on-ramps with orchestration or settlement with distribution, are likely to define the next phase of African fintech infrastructure.

The Anchor Story: Tether Backs LemFi

Tether has invested in LemFi, with USDT set to power settlement across key remittance corridors spanning Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. The goal is simple: reduce dependence on traditional payment rails like SWIFT. Founded in 2021, LemFi has raised over $85 million and serves more than one million customers moving money across those corridors.

The strategic logic is straightforward. Tether wants USDT to become the settlement layer for markets where traditional cross-border infrastructure remains slow, expensive, and fragmented. LemFi gives Tether distribution into exactly those corridors through an existing user base already transacting internationally. For users, almost nothing changes. They continue sending and receiving local currencies through LemFi’s interface while stablecoins quietly handle settlement in the background.

This is the stablecoin sandwich in practice: local currency on both ends, stablecoin liquidity in the middle.

The Emerging Pattern

The LemFi deal is the latest signal in a recent trend across African fintech. In less than a year, other key partnerships have reinforced the same conclusion: stablecoin settlement is becoming core financial infrastructure.

Tether and KotaniPay

In October 2025, Tether announced a strategic investment in KotaniPay, an African on-ramp and off-ramp provider connecting stablecoins to local payment channels.

Where LemFi targets diaspora remittances, KotaniPay focuses more directly on fiat conversion within African markets. Together, both investments reveal Tether’s broader strategy: expanding USDT distribution across the continent’s payment infrastructure.

Onafriq and Conduit

In February 2026, stablecoin payments platform Conduit partnered with Onafriq, one of Africa’s largest digital payments networks. Onafriq connects more than one billion mobile wallets and 500 million bank accounts across 40+ African markets. By integrating Conduit’s infrastructure, the network can now offer faster cross-border settlement in corridors where SWIFT transfers still take days.

The partnership initially focuses on treasury operations and liquidity management, but the deeper signal matters more: an incumbent African payments network is integrating stablecoin settlement into its core infrastructure stack. That may be the clearest sign yet that the stablecoin sandwich is becoming table stakes for serious African fintech operators.

Yellow Card, Visa, and Mastercard

Yellow Card has emerged as one of the continent’s most important stablecoin infrastructure providers, operating licensed on/off ramps across more than 20 African markets. In June 2025, Visa partnered with Yellow Card to pilot USDC settlement through Visa Direct. Mastercard later announced its own partnership with Yellow Card to expand stablecoin-enabled payments across Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

Visa and Mastercard are dominant incumbents in global payments infrastructure. Their decision to build stablecoin settlement rails alongside African crypto-native operators signals that the sandwich model has moved firmly into the mainstream.

What Comes Next

The stablecoin sandwich is evolving from infrastructure for difficult markets into infrastructure for global payments more broadly. Visa’s senior vice president for CEMEA recently stated that every institution moving money will eventually need a stablecoin strategy. The company already supports more than 130 stablecoin-linked card programmes across 40+ countries and plans to expand to over 100 countries by 2026.

For African fintechs, this moment is significant. The infrastructure they spent years building, on-ramps, off-ramps, liquidity corridors, and mobile money integrations, is now infrastructure global payment networks are actively paying to access.

The bigger question is whether African operators can maintain their advantages as global incumbents scale into their markets, and whether regulatory alignment across the continent allows the stablecoin sandwich to power intra-African trade, not just remittances and imports.

Next Edition
We look at who is building what in Africa’s stablecoin ecosystem, mapping out operators from infrastructure to last-mile service providers on the continent.

Stay tuned for the next edition of Stablecoin Digest, a Builders in Fintech Column.

#SD 3: Stablecoins are Becoming Everyday Money

Ernest Bosha — Sun, 10 May 2026 15:31:16 GMT

Gaspard Lezin, founder of crypto startup Suby, said that when he sent $1,000 from New York to Lagos via 8 different rails, the cheapest route cost ₦1,323,000 via traditional payments, while a USDT peer-to-peer transfer cost ₦1,400,000 – a ₦77,000 gap (roughly one month’s groceries). This reality reflects a broader trend in which Africa leads the world in stablecoin adoption.

A survey by BVNK and YouGov found 79% of African respondents hold dollar stablecoins, while 92% of African stablecoin users say their country’s economic situation directly drives their usage.

In our last edition, we explained how regulation is shaping operators’ business models. Besides that, a more interesting development is the specific usage and adoption patterns of stablecoins across the continent.

What are Customers Actually Using Stablecoins For?

Stablecoins cater to different people with their unique needs. Here are some reasons for the coin’s strong demand.

1. Remittance: The Entry Point

Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the world’s most expensive remittance destinations, with an 8.78% average cost for a $200 transfer compared to a global average of 6.49%. Stablecoin rails deliver the same transfers with fees under 1%. Considering that Nigeria alone received approximately $23 billion in remittances in 2025, such a reduction in fees would return hundreds of millions of dollars to families annually.

2. Currency Substitution: The Daily Use Case

In markets where inflation destroys savings and currency fluctuations erode purchasing power, stablecoins act as digital dollars that help protect currency value.

According to a BVNK survey, 95% of Nigerian crypto users prefer to be paid in stablecoins over naira. Also, 59% of them hold Tether’s USDT and 48% hold Circle’s USDC, the highest combined stablecoin ownership of any country in this. Similarly, in South Africa, stablecoins have displaced Bitcoin as the most used digital asset, with volumes growing about 50% monthly since October 2024. This shows that for African users, stablecoins offer a reliable store of value when local currencies fail.

3. B2B Trade & Supplier Payments: The Fastest-Growing Use Case

Businesses are also adopting stablecoins for instant and cheap cross-border transactions. A Quidax/TechCabal report states that energy companies, electronics importers, and raw materials traders are using over-the-counter (OTC) stablecoin desks to settle multi-million-dollar invoices with Asian, European, and Middle Eastern suppliers.

4. Freelancer & Gig Payments: The Growing Middle

The BVNK survey also reported that stablecoins represent an average of 35% of annual income for freelancers and gig workers. The survey further gathered that 3 out of 4 freelancers have increased their ability to do business internationally using stablecoins.

5. Treasury Management: The Corporate Sophistication Signal

African businesses now hold stablecoins as working capital, hedging against local currency depreciation without requiring offshore accounts. They also take advantage of stablecoin yields that their assets can earn on some decentralised finance (DeFi) protocols. A processor with $5M in daily float could earn $250,000 in additional annual revenue by investing in a yield platform with 5% APY (annual percentage yield). That’s extra profit with low risk.

6. Merchant Acceptance: Early but Watching

Many Africans now use stablecoins to pay merchants and online businesses supporting crypto payments for goods and services. Per BVNK, 71% would use a card to spend their stablecoins, but only about 6% of stablecoins globally are used to pay for goods and services.

In Africa, early merchant adoption is concentrated in tourism (Cape Town restaurants, Zanzibar tour operators), while operators like Kredete, Kulipa, and Bitnob have stablecoin-based cards for payments. This means the demand exists, but the infrastructure for smooth merchant acceptance needs to catch up.

What Transaction Types Dominate African Stablecoin Usage?

The transaction-type data from a Chainalysis report shows that Africa’s on-chain stablecoin activity is retail-led, need-driven, and spread across a growing institutional layer.

Notably, USDT commands nearly 80% of the retail stablecoin market in Africa, due to its liquidity depth and availability on TRON (enabling low-cost transfers). Meanwhile, USDC is more preferred among institutionals because of its compliance-sensitive B2B operators and businesses integrating with Circle’s payment network.

Adoption Patterns Across Jurisdictions

Nigeria: Volume and market leadership

Nigeria accounts for 40% of stablecoin inflows into Sub-Saharan Africa and processed over $92.1 billion in total crypto value in the 12 months to June 2025, nearly triple South Africa’s volume. The Investment and Securities Act 2025 classifies digital assets as securities and permits banks to service licensed Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs). The CBN’s selection of Flutterwave, Paystack, and Juicyway for an AML/CFT pilot also signals regulatory intent to integrate rather than suppress stablecoin activity.

South Africa: Institutional Maturity

With hundreds of VASPs licensed, Absa Bank in advanced stages of institutional crypto product development, and South Africa’s removal from the FATF grey list in late 2025, the country has built the regulatory certainty that institutional players require. The market is characterised by a high share of large-ticket arbitrage and institutional transfers, rather than retail remittances, a distinct profile from every other African market.

Kenya: The Mobile Money Bridge Test

Kenya’s stablecoin story is inseparable from M-Pesa. Kenya ranks 5th globally for transactional stablecoin use. M-Pesa’s partnership with ADI Chain, targeting 60+ million monthly users across eight African markets, is the most watched near-term infrastructure play on the continent. If it works, it creates the template for seamless stablecoin-to-mobile-money conversion at mass scale.

Ethiopia: The Stress-Test Case

A 30% birr depreciation in 2024 triggered 180% year-on-year (YoY) growth in retail stablecoin transfers, making Ethiopia the fastest-growing retail stablecoin market in Africa and 12th globally on the Chainalysis Adoption Index. No single data point better illustrates the move from local currency shock to immediate stablecoin demand. Zambia follows the same pattern, with 100%+ YoY growth recorded.

What Comes Next for Stablecoin Adoption in Africa?

Mobile Money Integration Will Define Mass Adoption

Africa’s mobile money rails processed over $1.4 trillion in 2025. Connecting that infrastructure to stablecoin settlement at scale would be transformative. M-Pesa’s ADI Chain partnership already puts this to the test. If stablecoin payments can arrive in mobile wallets as local currency, the on/off-ramp bottleneck that limits retail penetration will be resolved.

Credit Is the Second Act

Venture firm a16z predicts credit as the next stablecoin adoption driver after payments. Institutions are already piloting blockchain-based working capital finance for African SMEs. With a mature regulatory framework and high institutional adoption, Africa’s ecosystem could easily build out a regulated institutional credit system.

Institutional Capital Will Follow Infrastructure

Circle, the USDC issuer, listed its Circle Internet Group (CRCL) stock on the New York Stock Exchange in 2025. Visa also has a target milestone of 130+ stablecoin-linked card programmes targeting 100+ countries by the end of 2026. Similarly, Mastercard is partnering with local players like Yellow Card in Nigeria to drive stablecoin adoption in the EEMEA.

These developments show that global institutional capital is following the infrastructure being built in Africa. As more recognition follows and opportunities open, capital will follow to build out the infrastructure and capture value.

The critical bottleneck, which is the on/off-ramp where stablecoins meet local currency for domestic retail transactions, is already being addressed. What happens when that bottleneck is resolved could unleash the next phase of growth in African fintech.

Next Edition
We look at who is building what in Africa’s stablecoin ecosystem, mapping out operators from infrastructure to last-mile service providers on the continent.

Stay tuned for the next edition of Stablecoin Digest, a Builders in Fintech Column.

#SD 2: Africa is Rewriting the Rules for Stablecoins: Here’s What it Means

Ernest Bosha — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 15:08:46 GMT

Globally, stablecoins are of significant interest to regulators because of their potential impact on the financial system. In Africa, they promise faster, cheaper, more inclusive finance, which aligns with development finance policy. However, they also pose financial system risks, such as draining domestic bank deposits, undermining monetary policy, and facilitating capital flight.

But why are stablecoin regulations tricky in Africa? Here are some reasons:

Many African Currencies Are Unstable: Sub-Saharan Africa is home to some of the world’s most volatile currencies. When Ethiopia’s birr depreciated by approximately 30% in 2024, retail stablecoin transfers surged by 180% year-on-year. When the naira weakened sharply in early 2025, stablecoin transactions reached a monthly on-chain volume of nearly $25 billion in March 2025. These events show that Stablecoin adoption is a viable option for economic self-preservation among Africans.
Dollarisation Can Be Risky: The IMF has explicitly flagged the risk that dollar-denominated stablecoins (such as Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC), by giving consumers and businesses easy access to USD outside the banking system, could accelerate currency substitution and undermine central banks’ monetary tools. In countries already managing naira or cedi volatility, this is another cause for concern.
Structural Financial Exclusion Can Happen: Roughly 350 million adults in Sub-Saharan Africa remain unbanked. Stablecoins are among the few channels through which unbanked and underserved populations can access dollar-denominated savings and low-cost cross-border transfers without a formal bank account. Regulators who move too aggressively to restrict stablecoins risk foreclosing a genuine pathway to financial inclusion.
FX Liquidity Crisis: Most African countries have a FX shortage that has been declared a crisis. For businesses that cannot access hard currency through banking channels, stablecoins are becoming an operational necessity.

The result is that African regulators face a particularly unique version of the trade-off. Their options include banning stablecoins to preserve monetary control at the cost of financial innovation and inclusion; competing with stablecoins through CBDCs or local digital currency issuance; or adapting by licensing and managing stablecoins within existing regulatory perimeters. Most African jurisdictions have moved, slowly but visibly, from the first path toward the third.

A Decade of Evolution: African Stablecoin Regulation from 2014 to 2026

Stablecoin/digital asset regulation on the continent has followed a pattern of observe, discourage, permit, and regulate over the last decade. Let’s take a look at the trajectory.

2014–2018: Silence and Observation

When USDT launched in 2014 as the world’s first fiat-backed stablecoin, the dominant posture of African regulators was observation, watching Bitcoin and early crypto markets with suspicion but offering no specific regulatory guidance on stablecoins. A handful of central banks issued informal cautions about the risks of cryptocurrency, but these were not enforceable rules.

2017–2020: First Warnings and Early Restrictions

As crypto markets boomed in 2017, regulators began issuing formal advisories. Nigeria’s Central Bank issued its first directive in January 2017, instructing banks not to hold, trade, or transact in cryptocurrencies. South Africa’s Reserve Bank issued a clarification of a 2017 guidance note, stating that cryptocurrencies were not legal tender but did not explicitly prohibit their use. These were largely advisory positions, not enforcement-backed prohibitions. But they established a tone of caution that shaped the subsequent decade of regulatory development.

2021–2023: Prohibition, the eNaira, and the Limits of Control

This period was defined by prohibition, paradox, and the first structural frameworks. Nigeria’s 2021 crypto ban cut crypto exchanges off from the financial system overnight. This drove adoption underground into peer-to-peer (P2P) channels that regulators could not monitor.

The eNaira, launched in October 2021 as Africa’s first central bank digital currency (CBDC), intended to offer a regulated digital alternative to cryptocurrency, failed to gain traction.

Meanwhile, Mauritius enacted the (VAITOS) Act in February 2022, establishing the continent’s first comprehensive VASP licensing regime, and South Africa’s FSCA classified crypto as financial products under the FAIS Act, making it the first major African economy to move from observation to structured regulation.

In December 2023, Nigeria’s CBN lifted its ban on banks servicing crypto firms, now permitting banks to open accounts for licensed VASPs.

2024: The Binance Affair and Its Regulatory Fallout

This was the year of crisis and clarification. Nigeria’s detention of two Binance executives over alleged exchange rate manipulation sent shockwaves across the continent, with Nigerian stablecoin volumes falling by 38% in the aftermath. Yet the affair paradoxically accelerated the regulatory timeline: confronted with the scale of unregulated stablecoin activity, authorities across the continent moved from suppression to licensing. Nigeria’s SEC launched the Accelerated Regulatory Incubation Program (ARIP), and Kenya issued a Draft National VASP Policy. At this point, the industry began to grasp that compliance was now a competitive necessity.

2025–2026: Formalisation and the Removal from the Grey List

2025 was the most significant period for formal regulatory action in Africa. The headline event was in October 2025, when both South Africa and Nigeria were removed from the FATF grey list, a direct signal to global markets that both countries had made significant progress in anti-money laundering and financial compliance.

In the crypto space, Nigeria’s Investments and Securities Act (ISA) 2025 formally classified digital assets as securities and updated licensing requirements for Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs). Kenya also enacted a VASP Act in October 2025, creating a dual-regulator model with the CBK to oversee stablecoins and payments. In Ghana, a VASP Act was passed in December 2025. Meanwhile, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Seychelles, Zambia, and others are actively exploring regulatory policies and guardrails.

How Regulation Has Shaped Stablecoin Adoption and VASP Business Models

The impact of stablecoin regulations in Africa is seen in the growth of compliance-focused operators, rising adoption, and the creation of distinct windows of opportunity for different business models.

The Chilling and Clarifying Effect

Nigeria’s 2021 crypto banking ban showed that prohibition hinders formal adoption and stimulates informal alternatives. The reversal, starting with the December 2023 lifting of the banking ban and culminating in the ISA 2025, has resulted in the opposite. The crypto industry is now generating millions of dollars in inflows of institutional capital and compliance-oriented operators.

Between late 2023 and Q1 2024, Chainalysis estimates that institutional transactions in the $1-10 million range became the largest driver of crypto activity in Africa, a direct result of regulatory clarity enabling corporate treasury participation.

Compliance is an Advantage

South Africa’s early licensing has already demonstrably shaped its VASP ecosystem. The FSCA’s licensing process approved over 300 CASP licenses out of 512 applications as of December 2025, a 59% approval rate that signals meaningful standards while still enabling market growth with over 7.8 million users on licensed exchanges.

Business Model Evolution

Regulatory clarity has directly enabled new VASP business model categories:

On/Off-Ramp Specialists. Companies like Quidax and Yellow Card operate across multiple African countries and process stablecoin payments for thousands of businesses. These entities have built their business model around providing licensed, compliant fiat-to-stablecoin conversion in markets with explicit VASP compliance.
Stablecoin Orchestration Platforms. Lagos-based Juicyway, which processed $1.3 billion in cross-border payment volume through stablecoin rails before publicly launching in December 2024, shows new possibilities for B2B stablecoin orchestration. Its model of connecting liquidity pools for naira, USD, GBP, and CAD through stablecoins requires regulatory clarity on USDT and USDC usage for commercial transactions.
Domestic Stablecoin Issuers. Nigeria’s approval of cNGN (naira-backed stablecoin) and South Africa’s (rand-backed stablecoin) ZARU represent a new category of regulatory-sanctioned domestic stablecoin issuance. African regulators are not simply trying to contain or accommodate USDT and USDC, but to create competing domestically anchored alternatives.
B2B Treasury Management and Trade Finance. Regulatory frameworks that permit licensed VASPs to hold and transact in USDT and USDC have enabled African businesses to move treasury management onto stablecoin rails. Companies with supply chain exposure in USD can now hold operational working capital in USDC, reducing their exposure to naira or cedi depreciation without requiring offshore bank accounts. African businesses managing import payments, supplier settlements, and cross-border trade are increasingly using stablecoin rails as a substitute for correspondent banking.
Stablecoin-to-Mobile Money Bridges. Africa has already proven that people will use digital money at scale, as mobile money processed over $1.4 trillion in transactions in 2025. Kenya’s VASP Act, which explicitly assigns the Central Bank of Kenya oversight of stablecoin-to-payment conversions, is enabling an environment for M-Pesa’s stablecoin-to-M-Pesa integration through its partnership with ADI Chain to target 60+ million monthly users across eight African markets.
Institutional Custody and DeFi Yield: South Africa’s licensing laws are also enabling a new institutional custody market. The FSCA’s CASP licensing framework is creating the conditions for regulated banks to offer stablecoin custody and yield-bearing stablecoin products to corporate clients.

What Comes Next?

The regulatory landscape across Africa’s major markets has created the necessary conditions for a thriving stablecoin ecosystem. Individuals and business models are now adopting these digital assets at scale. The next step could be the development of corridor-specific VASP licensing across African jurisdictions.

However, the main unanswered question is whether African stablecoin regulation will harmonise at the continental level to eliminate fragmented frameworks. Whether Africa’s major regulators can develop a shared VASP or cross-border licensing framework, such as Europe’s MiCA, will determine how much stablecoins can contribute to the continent’s financial architecture.

Next Edition
We will evaluate adoption and usage patterns for stablecoins across Africa.

Stay tuned for the next edition of Stablecoin Digest, a Builders in Fintech Column.

#10: Nigerian Fintech is Serving Two Masters

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 16:31:19 GMT

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Hello Builder 👋,

Beth here again.

It’s been an interesting month in the ecosystem. And by interesting, I mean slightly chaotic.

Between security breaches at major financial institutions, MTN quietly pausing its airtime lending service, and that brief moment when it looked like the Nigerian government had invested $75 million in Flutterwave, there’s been a lot to process.

Anyway, this is the tenth issue of Inside Fintech. If you’ve made it this far, you’re an OG — forward this to someone who should be keeping up too.

Today, I want to talk about something that doesn’t always make headlines, but quietly shapes how everything else works: regulatory overlap in Nigerian fintech.

“You cannot serve two masters.” We’ve all heard that before. But Nigerian fintech seems to be trying anyway.

The industry has grown quickly from about 138 companies in 2020 to over 500 in 2025. Growth like that is expected. But the more interesting thing is beneath the surface. In 2021, fintechs were grouped into 17 categories. By 2025, that number dropped to 12. It looks like simplification. But if you look closely, it’s convergence.

Payment companies are moving into lending. Crypto platforms are plugging into payment systems. Infrastructure players are building customer-facing products. Everyone is expanding. And once that starts, the idea of “this company does only one thing” disappears.

Now here’s where it gets tricky. Regulation is still built around those older, clearly defined categories. But fintechs are building across multiple layers of the system, while regulation still expects them to fit neatly into one box. So, you end up with a mismatch.

With this reality, there are two possibilities:

Expansion Within One Regulator

The first is when a fintech starts as one thing and expands into another within the same regulatory boundary. Think of a payment processor that moves into lending or starts holding customer funds. We’ve seen this with companies like Paystack and Flutterwave, which started with payments but expanded into adjacent financial services.

In cases like this, the transition is relatively straightforward because they are still dealing with the Central Bank of Nigeria. They may need additional licences, but they are still answering to the same regulator.

Building Across Multiple Regulators

The second lens is where things start to get messy. This is when a fintech expands across different regulatory territories entirely—where one product begins to touch payments, investments, and other adjacent functions at the same time. At that point, it’s no longer a one-regulator conversation. It’s no longer just: “What are you building?”. It becomes: “Who exactly regulates this?

Sometimes, the product doesn’t even change, yet multiple regulators become interested in it anyway. And that’s where it gets even more complicated. Because now, it’s not just the company crossing boundaries. The regulators are. Even though these platforms are primarily positioned as investment or asset-based products under the Securities and Exchange Commission Nigeria, the Central Bank of Nigeria has also started signaling interest through initiatives like its pilot supervision programme.

So even without the product fundamentally changing, the regulatory surface around it expands.

The Crypto Case Study (SEC vs CBN)

Let’s take crypto exchanges a step further.

On paper, it seems straightforward. Crypto assets are treated as investment instruments, so you would expect companies in this space to be regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission Nigeria.

And that expectation is seen in policy. In early 2026, the SEC increased the minimum capital requirement for Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs) to ₦2 billion, doubling the earlier ₦1 billion proposal from 2024. This signals that the SEC is actively positioning itself as the primary regulator of digital asset platforms.

So far, only a few players like Busha and Quidax have received Approval-in-Principle under this framework. So from that lens, it looks clear: crypto falls under the SEC.

But that’s only one side of the story. Because in reality, crypto companies in Nigeria don’t operate in complete isolation from the traditional financial system. They still need to interact with the naira— users deposit in naira, convert to crypto, and eventually withdraw back into their bank accounts.

And the moment naira enters the picture, the Central Bank of Nigeria becomes relevant. Which is why the CBN has also started paying closer attention, as seen in its recent pilot supervision programme targeting select VASPs for regulatory oversight and intelligence.

So now, what you have is a single product sitting across two different regulatory lenses:

One focused on crypto as an asset
The other focused on the movement of money within the financial system

And that’s where the lines start to blur. Because, it’s no longer clear where one regulator’s responsibility ends—and where another begins.

Telco Airtime Lending Case Study — FCCPC vs NCC

Earlier this month, airtime lending services quietly paused after MTN Nigeria suspended Xtratime, followed shortly by Airtel Nigeria.

What happened?

The backstory

In 2025, the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission introduced new rules for digital lending — targeting abusive loan apps, harassment, and opaque practices. They extended these rules into airtime and data lending, and introduced requirements that went beyond typical consumer protection including: mandatory intermediaries in lending structures, restrictions on exclusive partnerships, approval requirements for commercial agreements etc.

At the same time, telecom services like airtime lending already sit within the domain of the Nigerian Communications Commission. And that’s where things started to collide. The operators in these affected companies were left in a position where compliance is no longer a single-regulatory track decision.

The Big Take

If you ask me, I’ll say fintech isn’t breaking the rules. It’s exposing how outdated the rules are. For a long time, regulation assumed that financial services would stay neatly separated — payments here, lending there, banking somewhere else.

Today, payment companies lend. Crypto platforms integrate with payment systems. Infrastructure players move closer to the customer. The lines have blurred, and that’s not because companies are trying to bypass regulation, but the market now demands more integrated solutions.

The problem is, regulation hasn’t evolved at the same pace. Fintech is moving fast, and regulation has to catch up.

Tell Me I’m Wrong 👇🏽

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What Does This Mean for Builders?

The real question is whether regulatory overlap is actually a problem or just a natural outcome of a fast-growing industry. On paper, multiple regulators can be a strength. In practice, it’s more complicated.

Here’s what it looks like:

More expertise, more coverage
Different regulators bring different perspectives, which can reduce blind spots.
Blurred boundaries
In reality, those lines aren’t always clear, and that’s where ambiguity starts.
Ambiguity becomes operational
This doesn’t stay theoretical. It shows up in how products are built, launched, and scaled.
Regulation becomes dynamic
It’s no longer something you map once, as it evolves with your product.
You’re not building for one regulator anymore
Multiple regulators can have jurisdiction over the same product at the same time, or at different stages.

Beth’s Corner

Let’s be honest. Fintech isn’t trying to bend the rules. It’s just building in a way the rules didn’t anticipate. And when that happens, it stops being about compliance alone.

Right now, the builders who win won’t just be the fastest, but those who understand where the rules end and where reality begins. Slowing down or learning the edges as you go, which works better?

Let’s Discuss 👇🏽

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Quick Data Drop

Global financial sector cyberattacks rose from 864 in 2024 to 1,858 in 2025, a 115% increase
Nigeria is home to 506 fintech companies as of December 2025
Digital transactions in emerging markets rose from 55 per adult in 2017 to 251 per adult in 2024, showing an acceleration in payment system usage
Africa accounts for approximately 74% of global mobile money transaction volume, making it the world’s dominant mobile-first payments region
Kenya has 400,000+ mobile money agents, giving it one of the most extensive mobile money agent networks in Africa per capita

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In Other News - Industry Updates

1. Flutterwave secured a Microfinance Banking License

Flutterwave recently obtained a microfinance banking license in Nigeria, and the way it was communicated triggered mixed reactions across the ecosystem.

Some argue the company should have been explicit that it is a microfinance banking license, to avoid confusion around scope and capabilities. Others believe it doesn’t really matter, that what counts is the strategic direction, not the technical classification.

Now I want to hear your thought. When fintechs secure regulated licenses, does precision in communication matter as much as the substance of expansion?

What do you think — does the distinction matter, or not? Tell me 👇🏽

2. NCC and CBN partner to tackle payment fraud

The National Communications Commission (NCC) and the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) have signed an MoU to strengthen coordination on payment fraud prevention and digital identity risk management.

As part of the agreement, two joint committees were established:

Payment Systems & Consumer Protection Commmittee
Telecommunications Identity Risk Management System (TIRMS) Committee

The collaboration is aimed at addressing rising fraud risks linked to telecom-financial intersections, particularly around identity-linked financial access and SIM-based fraud vectors.

3. GTCO’s fintech arm becomes its most profitable non-banking business

GTCO’s fintech subsidiary, HabariPay, emerged as its most profitable non-banking business in 2025.

Profit After Tax (PAT): ₦9.7 billion (2025)
Up from ₦3.8 billion (2024)

This places HabariPay ahead of other non-banking subsidiaries in GTCO’s portfolio, reflecting the growing commercial viability of embedded fintech operations within traditional banking groups.

Usually, bank-led fintech subsidiaries starts as experimental extensions, however, they are becoming material profit centers inside legacy financial institutions.

4. The Big Guys Got Hit

In the past few weeks, Sterling Bank and Remita have both been caught up in alleged data breach investigations, with regulators stepping in to assess the scope and risk to users. This was attributed to massive data exposure and system vulnerabilities across connected infrastructure, not just isolated systems.

If the big guys can get hit, then size isn’t a security advantage. If anything, the bigger you grow, the more exposed you become.

For fintech startups, the takeaway is simple: security isn’t optional — it has to be built into the system from day one.

Before I Go, Let’s Talk

Do you think fintech regulation is getting clearer or it has become more complicated?

Reply & Tell Me 👇🏽

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Fintech Opportunities

These are the latest fintech jobs and opportunities that we’ve curated, so you don’t have to. Looking for a job in fintech? Shoot your shot at these roles:

BIF Insider

Fintech Radar is Live!

Fintech Radar is up and running — a space to discover fintech startups across Africa.

If you’re building something worth spotlighting, you can fill out the form here.

New articles in the African Fintech Library

Cyber Threats to the Financial Sector in Africa
https://buildersinfintech.com/afl/article/cyber-threats-to-the-financial-sector-in-africa
The AML Mandate Clock is Ticking
https://buildersinfintech.com/afl/article/the-aml-mandate-clock-is-ticking

If you want to contribute to the African Fintech Library, you can become a contributor here.

Join Builders in Fintech (BIF)

We’re a growing community of people building, operating, and scaling fintech infrastructure across Africa. If you’re interested in real context (not just buzzwords), this is where you want to be.

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That’s All, Builder

There’s a lot to unpack from this month’s newsletter. Let’s talk and share our opinions in the comments. And if this newsletter made you think of the new CBN policies and Nigeria’s finance industry differently, tap the ❤️ and last more thing - Forward This to Someone in Fintech👇🏽:

#SD 1: How Stablecoins Are Rewiring Payments in Africa

Ernest Bosha — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 15:01:20 GMT

Stablecoins are quietly becoming Africa’s most important payment rail. Whether you’re invested in fintech news or not, you cannot have missed conversations around stablecoins lately — from Mastercard acquiring BVNK, a stablecoin payment infrastructure provider, for $1.8 billion to AXIAN investing in Hamilton Labs to expand the use of its USDh stablecoin across Africa.

According to a BVNK report, Africa now leads stablecoin ownership globally at 79%. No matter your level of awareness, the adoption of stablecoins in Africa is real. But what exactly are stablecoins, why are Africans adopting them faster than anyone else, and what does it mean for fintech builders on the continent? Let’s unpack it all in this inaugural edition of Stablecoin Digest.

Stablecoins: What Exactly Are They?

A stablecoin is a cryptocurrency designed to have the same value as the physical asset it’s connected to. Now, you probably have heard of Bitcoin and Ethereum. The common thing about these legacy crypto assets is their notorious volatility — their prices can go up and down at any time. For instance, Bitcoin’s price has dropped by 19% in Q1 2026, making digital assets like it poor tools for everyday payments or savings.

That’s the problem stablecoins solve by pegging their values to a stable external asset, usually the US dollar. The idea is that for every existing stablecoin on the blockchain, a corresponding unit is held in a reserve. However, some stablecoins also use algorithms to hold that peg.

The most widely used stablecoins today are Tether (USDT) and USD Coin (USDC), which are fiat-collateralised. This means for every USDT or USDC in circulation, the issuer (Tether or Circle, respectively) holds an equivalent amount in cash and short-term government bonds. If you deposit $1,000, you receive 1,000 digital tokens. You return those tokens, you get your dollars back. The token is burned; the cycle is closed.

There are also crypto-collateralised stablecoins (backed by other digital assets like Ethereum) and algorithmic stablecoins (which use supply-and-demand mechanisms rather than reserves; a model that failed spectacularly with the Terra/LUNA collapse in 2022). In practice, fiat-backed USDT and USDC dominate in Africa.

The Problem Stablecoins Are Solving in Africa

To understand why Africa leads the world in stablecoin adoption, you have to start with the problems that made alternatives necessary in the first place.

Remittances Are Expensive

Africa received approximately $104 billion in remittances in 2024, almost twice the continent’s total overseas development assistance. But Africans incur the highest costs compared to other regions when sending money home. Sub-Saharan Africa averaged 8.37% in remittance fees in 2024, against a global average of around 6%.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target is 3%, a threshold the continent is nowhere near reaching. For a family receiving $300 a month from a relative abroad, that fee difference could cover some groceries, medicine, or a ticket to watch your local football team play live.

FX Access is Broken and Costly

Many African countries face FX shortages, local-currency volatility, and weak banking infrastructure, making it difficult for businesses to access foreign currencies, such as the US dollar, required for imports, supplier payments, or cross-border treasury management. This forces African businesses to increasingly adopt defensive treasury strategies because working capital is exposed to currency depreciation. In turn, these businesses suffer a high idle-cash drag, where money that should fuel growth is trapped in precautionary FX buffers.

Cross-Border Payments are Slow and Fragmented.

Only 12% of intra-African transactions are fully processed within the continent; the rest are routed through correspondent banks in the US or Europe. The implications are the additional cost, delay, and opacity faced by every transaction. These are not just inconveniences; they are structural barriers to economic participation.

Cross-border payment friction weakens the bargaining power of African businesses in the global market, as they face worse payment terms, lower priority for import shipments, and smaller order limits due to limited open-account credit available to their sectors. The macro-outcome is that, in the global market, African businesses, especially SMEs, become price takers because of fixed commodity prices and exchange rate factors beyond their control. While stablecoins at least address fragmentation and speed issues, reducing this macro strain, they also enhance competitiveness.

What Stablecoins Actually Do

A stablecoin is, simply put, a dollar that exists on a blockchain. It inherits the dollar’s stability while also offering the blockchain’s benefits, including instant settlement, 24/7 availability, borderless transfers, and smart contract compatibility.

When you send USDT from Lagos to Nairobi, the transaction clears in seconds, at nearly zero cost, without a correspondent bank in New York in the middle. There are no business day limits, no FX desk to negotiate with, and no opaque fee structure. The transaction is recorded on-chain and has irreversible settlement finality without a clearinghouse.

Crucially, stablecoins are also programmable money. They can be embedded in smart contracts that automate payroll, escrow payments, or supplier settlements, thereby unlocking use cases that legacy systems cannot support at comparable costs.

How Africa Is Using Them Right Now

According to Chainalysis, stablecoins make up 43% of all crypto transaction volume in the region. Some ways in which stablecoins are being used include:

Freelancers and remote workers are receiving payment in USDC or USDT directly into crypto wallets, bypassing costly international wire systems. In Kenya, a Mercy Corps Ventures pilot found that using stablecoins for $5 micropayments from international clients reduced fees from 29% to 2%. Services like Kotani Pay allow users to convert stablecoin receipts directly to M-Pesa in minutes.
Importers and traders are using stablecoins to pay overseas suppliers, avoiding FX queues and the margins banks charge to access hard currency. A Lagos trader holding working capital in USDT protects his import margins from Naira depreciation.
Startups and fintechs are settling cross-border transactions through stablecoin rails rather than SWIFT. Infrastructure providers like Yellow Card, CrissCross, VALR, and Busha are building the plumbing (on-ramps, off-ramps, and liquidity networks) that enable this at scale.
Payments and OTC markets operate across Africa, where peer-to-peer platforms and stablecoin banking and payments providers allow individuals to exchange stablecoins for local currency.

Why Now? What’s Driving the Surge?

Stablecoins are not new; Tether launched in 2014, but adoption in Africa has accelerated sharply in recent years. Several forces explain the timing.

Mobile penetration has created the distribution infrastructure. Sub-Saharan Africa has over 600 million mobile money accounts, while mobile banking and Fintech apps are part of daily life. Stablecoins plugged into mobile apps for on- and off-ramps feel like a natural extension of the payment behaviour Africans already have.
Crypto rails have matured. Platforms like Afriex, Luno, Quidax, Yellow Card, and a growing roster of regional fintechs have made it easier to on-ramp from local currency, transact in stablecoins, and off-ramp back to cash.
Regulatory grey zones have allowed experimentation. Most African jurisdictions neither clearly permitted nor clearly prohibited stablecoin activity until recently, creating space for builders and users to test what works.

💡 KEY INSIGHT
Stablecoins are emerging as Africa’s hidden payment infrastructure. Not a financial experiment or a speculative asset, but the backbone that businesses, freelancers, importers, and diaspora communities rely on to transfer money when the formal system fails them or becomes too costly.

What Comes Next?

Three forces will likely define the next chapter of stablecoin development in Africa:

Regulatory Clarity

Mauritius, South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, and Rwanda have different regulatory frameworks for digital assets. Nigeria’s Investment and Securities Act 2025 clarified registration requirements for virtual asset service providers; recently, even the normally reserved CBN has commenced an AML/CFT/CPF Supervision Pilot for selected providers.

Similarly, Kenya’s Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASP) Act 2025 was enacted in October 2025. As regulatory clarity improves, more institutional capital and formal fintech integration will follow, but it will also limit the informal channels that drove early adoption.

Growth of Local Currency Stablecoins.

Nigeria’s first regulated Naira stablecoin (cNGN) has received a temporary SEC license. This is a case of local-currency stablecoins offering blockchain settlement speeds without the implicit dollarisation that worries regulators. More local-currency stablecoins will come on-chain over the next 12 months.

Institutional Adoption.

South Africa’s regulatory framework has licensed hundreds of providers, and traditional banks like Absa are engaging with digital asset infrastructure. Circle’s partnership with Sasai Fintech to expand USDC distribution through mobile wallets signals that the institutional layer is starting to build on the “shadow” infrastructure that arrived first.

Overall, the current level of stablecoin adoption on the continent is significant and impactful, but it is still in its early stages. The next chapter will see stablecoins embedded seamlessly in trade finance, payroll systems, supply chains, and, eventually, banking settlements through tokenisation.

Now, you get the full picture. Next time you see your favourite tech bro posting what they learned about off-ramp infrastructure on a night out in Nairobi, I hope you will feel equipped to jump into their comments.

Next Edition
We’ll go deeper into the regulatory landscape for stablecoins and digital assets. If you have thoughts, comments, or feedback, reply and let us know.

Stay tuned for the next edition of Stablecoin Digest, a Builders in Fintech Column.

The “Instant” in Instant Transfer is Now Optional

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 16:03:01 GMT

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Hello Builder,

This is Beth, and welcome to my first edition of the BIF email newsletter. Fasten your seatbelts for a nice time!

So, one of the biggest fintech news in Nigeria this month is that “Instant” transfers in Nigeria might not always be instant anymore. And before you panic, this isn’t because of a system failure or banking regression.

The Central Bank of Nigeria made a big move this month, announcing that customers now have full control over instant bank transfers. Plus, banks can now delay or block certain transactions, especially when a customer’s Bank Verification Number (BVN) or account activity is suspicious. Which means the days of Nigerians sending money and expecting it to land immediately may be over due to certain conditions.

But that’s not all. The apex bank also released a revised BVN framework that allows a change of phone number only once forever, and another mandate on dormant accounts. Let’s talk about what actually changed — and more importantly, what it means to you as a fintech builder.

The Big Take

Some say this move by CBN is going to slow down payments. I disagree because it’s about taking control of risk in a system that moved faster than its security systems.

For years, instant payments in Nigeria prioritised speed over airtight safety. Now, the CBN is saying, “We still want speed, but not at the expense of security.”

So, what’s my take?

In short, I believe this is the beginning of our financial systems shifting from just “real-time payments” to “conditional real-time payments.”

Not every transaction will pass automatically anymore going forward. And honestly, it was only a matter of time. There has been a 196% increase in financial fraud losses over the past five years, with 70% of such crimes in Nigeria being enabled by the banking and fintech sectors.

Tell Me I’m Wrong 👇🏽

Leave a comment

What Actually Changed With These Circulars?

Let’s break down all the details.

1. Instant Transfers Are Now Conditional

With this update, Nigerian banks can now:

Delay transactions
Flag suspicious transfers
Request additional checks before processing transactions

So, your Nigerian bank transfer might now “hang” due to intentional, systemic bank actions.

2. BVN Is Becoming Central to Risk Decisions

The BVN was originally for KYC only. Now, it’s a real-time litmus test for risk. Your transactions can be slowed down or blocked by banks and fintech platforms if your BVN is linked to:

Suspicious activity
Multiple accounts behaving oddly
Fraud alerts

3. Dormant Accounts Are Not Dead

Accounts that haven’t been used for a while can now:

Face restrictions
Require revalidation
Be monitored more closely than before

In other words, that “old account you suddenly remembered” might not move money as it used to anymore. Plus, affidavits are no longer required for reactivating dormant accounts that have not been transferred to the Unclaimed Balances Trust Fund (UBTF). In short, the CBN is not after the money in your dormant account, and you can access it quite easily now.

4. Customers Now Have More Power

For a long time, customers in Nigeria’s payment system had one job, which was to initiate transfers and hope everything went through. That’s changing with the CBN’s new rules because customers are now becoming part of the control layer.

They can:

Set transaction limits (the existing maximum limits of ₦25 million for individuals and ₦250 million for corporates are now discretionary)
Restrict how and when their money moves
Trigger additional checks on their accounts

While this sounds small, the changes redefine how trust is now distributed between financial institutions and their users.

See the Receipt

What The New CBN Rules Mean for Builders

We’ve been talking about transfers this, BVN that. But if you’re building any product in the Nigerian fintech space, these policies are more than just sending and receiving money or carrying out fraud checks. As a builder:

Speed Can No Longer Be Your Only Selling Point

If your product is built on “Fast payments with no friction”, you need another unique selling point (USP). Security is part of the experience going forward.

Fraud Infrastructure Is Now a Core Product Feature

Fraud detection and prevention systems, including KYC checks, anti-money laundering (AML), and counter-terrorism financing (CTF) tools already exist in the Nigerian financial industry. However, things aren’t just about compliance anymore.

Your fintech product now needs:

Smarter transaction monitoring
Better user alerts
Clear communication when delays happen

Products’ UX Around “Delay” is Non-Negotiable

In the past, if a transfer got delayed, users blamed the bank. Now, they know that it might be your system.

So the question to ask more is: “How do you explain a delay without creating panic?” Because confusion can easily lead to loss of trust these days.

Identity Systems Just Got More Valuable

BVN is becoming more powerful in Nigerian banking. This means with a good strategy, your product could become a hot cake if you’re building:

Identity layers
Risk checking and scoring tools
Verification APIs

Forward this to Your Team 👇🏽

Beth’s Corner

Let’s be honest. Nigeria doesn’t have an instant payment problem. In fact, the country has one of Africa’s most advanced payment systems. However, it has a big fraud problem embedded in convenience.

We all enjoy the speed, but it’s becoming easy to exploit. So, this isn’t “CBN slowing innovation.” It’s CBN correcting an imbalance.

Quick Data Drop

Nigeria processes over ₦1 billion in monthly transactions
Fraud complaints in Nigeria rose by 196% in five years, increasing alongside transaction volume
BVN is one of the most used identity systems in Africa, covering over 67 million users
Dormant accounts are well-known entry points for fraudulent activity, especially in cases involving identity theft and account takeovers

Simply put, the system grew fast. The guardrails now need to catch up.

If I Were Building Right Now

I would do four things immediately:

Design for “non-instant” scenarios
Assume delays will happen and build UX around it.
Make risk visible, not invisible
Don’t just block transactions, explain why.
Invest in transaction intelligence early
Not just after something breaks.
Reframe speed as “secure speed”
Because users will trade speed for safety if you communicate it well.

Get More Tips Like This 👇🏽

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In Other News - Industry Updates

1. Wise Enters Nigeria’s Remittance Arena

Global payments company Wise has secured an International Money Transfer Operator (IMTO) licence in Nigeria, meaning it has now entered Nigeria’s remittance industry.

This means:

Nigeria’s remittance market is now “global vs local”
Pricing pressure is coming (and it won’t be gentle)
Product experience will matter more than just accessibility

If you’re building in cross-border payments, competition just got global.

2. NALA Fully Plugged In

Stablecoin payments company NALA has also received an IMTO licence and completed a direct integration with NIBSS, Nigeria’s core payments infrastructure.

This means:

Stablecoin rails are quietly merging with Nigeria’s traditional financial infrastructure
Global fintechs are building inside Nigeria’s system and not around it

3. Moniepoint Set to Capture Africa’s $50 Billion Restaurant Market

Let’s not rush past this one. Moniepoint just acquired Orda. On the surface, it looks like a fintech buying restaurant software, but in reality, Moniepoint is moving from helping businesses collect their money to supporting them in their daily operations.

With access to restaurants’ data, such as inventory, bookkeeping, and payments, could Moniepoint’s goal be to strengthen its credit system for vertical businesses through this partnership? Because once you see a merchant’s full activity, you can assess risk better, lend better, and retain them longer. I guess we’ll find out.

Before I Go, Let’s Talk

Be honest. Would you rather have:

Instant transfers with higher risk or slightly slower transfers with more control

Reply & Argue With Me 👇🏽

Leave a comment

Fintech Opportunities

These are the latest fintech jobs and opportunities that we’ve curated, so you don’t have to. Looking for a job in fintech? Shoot your shot at these roles:

BIF Insider

March Masterclass is Here!

If you’re building fintech in Africa, your KYC provider determines how fast users get onboarded, how much you spend per customer, and your quiet churn rate. In this month’s BIF masterclass, our speaker will be tackling the “local vs global KYC provider” debate. Which is better for you, and what can go wrong in practice? Be there to find out!

Join the Session

Join Builders in Fintech (BIF)

We’re a growing community of people building, operating, and scaling fintech infrastructure across Africa. If you’re interested in real context (not just buzzwords), this is where you want to be.

If You Build, You Belong Here

Share Your Story on AFL

That’s All, Builder

A Big Change is Coming 🥳

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 16:31:46 GMT

Hi Builder,

We’ve been thinking about this for a while, and it’s time to finally let the cat out of the bag.

#InsideFintech (by BIF) has always focused on helping you keep up with what’s happening in fintech, including the news, the trends, and everything in between. But lately, it’s felt like something is missing.

So we’ve decided to make a change. This month, a new voice is stepping in to handle BIF newsletters, and her name is Beth. *Drumrolls*

Who is Beth?

Beth is the new voice at BIF who believes that knowing the biggest stories in the industry is one thing, but understanding what they mean for builders and the average person on the street is “importanter.”

Here are a few things about her:

She’s a bit more direct.
A bit more curious.
And not interested in only the big headlines.

You’ll notice these in how she writes, questions the status quo, and calls things out.

Please note that nothing else changes in our mission to connect builders and provide the resources required to thrive. Now, look forward to hearing from Beth in the next newsletter edition.

We think you’ll enjoy the conversation. Until then, get ready ⏳!

#8 Do You Know How Your Bank Transfers Get Settled?

Builders In Fintech — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 16:01:12 GMT

Welcome to #InsideFintech - your monthly dose of insights, updates, opportunities and trends to help you build and navigate fintech in Africa.

If you're building or just curious about how stuff work, this is where you get fintech-savvy.

Also, we have a request. Will you grant it? Say Yes, Say Yes! If you have found this newsletter beneficial so far, tell someone about #InsideFintech today! Click the share button below to help us grow the ecosystem.

Interbank Settlement Explained

Whether you went to a public or private secondary school in Nigeria, one (almost) certain thing was that you had moments when you borrowed pens from classmates or other times when you were the pen lender.

Now, imagine that there was a board that took records of who was owing another person a pen by the teacher. Even if you couldn’t get your pen back or return the one you borrowed immediately, everyone could easily keep track.

For example:

Tobi owes Amaka 1 pencil.
Amaka owes Kunle 2 pencils.

At the end of the day, instead of everyone exchanging pens multiple times, only the final net differences are settled.

The final balancing is called settlement.

Banks work the same way, except that instead of pens, it’s real money from you and I in the mix. A money transfer is only complete when the banks have actually settled each other.

So there are two things involved:

Payment = an instruction
Settlement = the actual movement of money between institutions

What Happens at Transaction time?

Let’s say you want to show your babe workings and send ₦20K for lunch from your Access Bank account to his or her GTB account. The process happens in two parts:

Part 1: The Sending Bank (Access Bank)

Access Bank will:

Debit your account ₦20,000
Credit an internal Interbank Payable (or Transit) account the same amount (₦20,000)

Your balance reduces immediately. However, Access has not yet transferred funds to GTB. At this point, Access owes GTB ₦20,000.

Part 2: The Receiving Bank (GTB)

GTB will:

Debit its internal Interbank Receivable account ₦20,000
Credit its customer ₦20,000

The instruction for GTB to credit its customer comes from a switch, in most cases, NIBSS. Since your balance reduced after sending the funds, NIBSS asks GTB to credit the receiving account with the ₦20K even before Access Bank sends the settlement funds to them. This is why settlement is critical.

How Net Settlement Works Across Banks

In reality, settlement is never just between banks. Every day, millions of transfers move across multiple institutions. Rather than settling each transaction individually, the system aggregates them.

Assume four participating banks: Access Bank, GTB, First Bank of Nigeria, and Zenith Bank.

During the day, these banks send money back and forth. Instead of settling each transfer individually, the system aggregates all transactions, calculating the total each bank sent and received.

This settlement happens at the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) level, where the CBN debits and credits each bank’s CBN settlement account. This is when the actual money moves between banks, closing the transaction cycle.

Here’s what the end-of-day position looks like after all transactions are summed:

Net Position for each Bank = Total Received - Total Sent.

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Industry Updates

Key Takeaways from the CBN Fintech Report

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) recently released its first fintech ecosystem report, titled “Shaping the Future of Fintech in Nigeria: Innovation, Inclusion and Integrity.” Here’s what stood out:

Nigeria leads in real-time payments, but the gap is closing
Nigeria’s instant payment infrastructure is among the most advanced in Africa and a key driver of digital finance growth. However, other countries are now also delivering instant payments, so it’s no longer a unique advantage.
Regulation can slow product launches
62.5% of respondents reported delays and unclear guidelines as major barriers to product development and innovation.
Policy and industry need better alignment
There is a disconnect between regulatory intention and operator experience. Clearer rules, and expectations would help resolve many of the regulatory concerns fintech companies face.

Have you read the report yet? What do you think?
I am about to read it

Leave a comment

PAPSS — The Continent’s Switch Is Growing

The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) has gotten stronger. Kenya’s Pesalink has joined the network to advance the vision of making cross-border payments across Africa as smooth as domestic transfers.

PAPSS promises cheaper and faster inter-African settlement. However, stablecoins and other digital currencies are making similar promises.

So the question is: which rails will actually power Africa’s cross-border future?

We’re watching closely.

📚 What We Read This Month

CBN’s Fintech Report

Mobile Money Agents as a Service

Offline Payments Are The New Battleground for Nigerian Fintechs

💬 BIF Insider

The African Fintech Library (AFL) is Live 🚀

Everyone is buzzing about this! We’re seeing builders contributing their quota to the knowledge gap, operators sharing their experiences for everyone, and AFL is at the centre documenting evergreen stories for the ecosystem.

You want a seat at this table. Be a part of it!

Contribute your expertise and help other builders learn from your knowledge.

Become a Contributor

📢 Join Builders in Fintech

We’re a growing community of people building, operating, and scaling fintech infrastructure across Africa. If you’re interested in real context (not just buzzwords), this is where you want to be.

Join Us

If you like this issue or you learnt something new, tap the ❤️ at the top.

The African Fintech Library Is Here

Builders In Fintech — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 11:02:12 GMT

Welcome to a New Dispensation!

Africa’s fintech ecosystem is booming. Every day, builders across the continent are creating solutions that are reshaping how money moves. Yet, for all the progress, one thing has remained scattered: knowledge.

Today, we are taking a step forward to change that. We are thrilled to announce the launch of the African Fintech Library (AFL).

What is the African Fintech Library?

The African Fintech Library is a publication for practical fintech knowledge. We believe that African fintech deserves to be written by the people who are building it, and we have now brought to life the industry’s long-needed central publication.

Our vision is simple: One archive. 10,000 practical insights. All of Africa.

With AFL, an operator in Nigeria can learn how money moves in Senegal. A founder in Kenya should be able to learn from a compliance mistake in Ghana. That accessible practical knowledge getting to everyone through industry experts is our vision at AFL.

Learn More

Why this Matters

Africa’s fintech ecosystem is moving fast and with a projection to be 5x more by 2028. This means the best builders will be those who prioritize knowledge and can stay at the forefront of innovation.

The Library’s goal is to level the playing field and make fintech knowledge accessible to everyone looking to build faster and better.

At the heart of AFL is a simple idea: knowledge can power innovation. Every article is authored by real fintech practitioners with hands-on experience building across payments, regulation, cross-border systems, credit, risk, infrastructure and more

Think of AFL as your go-to reference whenever you want to:

Get expert knowledge (backed by strong experience and thorough research)
Learn fintech in the African context
Understand how fintech companies navigate regulation, governance, and more

Contribute to Africa’s Fintech Future

If you have practical fintech knowledge, you can share your story with the Library. Here’s how it works:

Write a publication-ready guide to a fintech topic you know both in theory and in practice, using your personal experience to illustrate your points.
Submit your article
Your article is reviewed by the Builders in Fintech editorial team (review takes 2–4 weeks)
Your article goes live and becomes part of the Library, contributing to the continent’s knowledge

I want to Contribute

Start Exploring Today!

Visit www.buildersinfintech.com/afl to get started

Builders in Fintech

#14: Can African Fintechs Really Go Global?

Hello Builder 👋,

The African Startup Expansion Scene

LemFi: Expansion With Infrastructure Behind It

Chipper Cash: Licensing Doesn’t Guarantee Success

The Paystack Contrast

Maybe the Better Strategy Is Expansion Into Similar Markets?

Is M&A the Answer?

So, When Will African Fintechs Become Truly Global?

The Big Take

What This Means for Builders

Beth’s Corner

Quick Data Drop

In Other News

BIF Insider

Join Builders in Fintech (BIF)

Share Your Story on AFL

That’s All, Builder

SD #10: Your Next Stablecoin Purchase May Cost More

Your Next Stablecoin Purchase Might Look a Little Different

Who Actually Pays More?

If You Save in USDT Every Month

If You’re Paying Suppliers Abroad

If You’re Receiving USDT from Overseas

Nigerian VASPs Are Now Ad-Hoc NRS Branches

Tax IDs Become Part of Onboarding

Your Ledger Has to Become Tax-aware

You’re Withholding Tokens—Not Naira

You’re Also Responsible for Remittance

And You’ll Need Records Kept for Years

More Questions than Answers

So, What Comes Next?

#SD 9: Plot Twist: Regulation Might Be Stablecoins' Biggest Ally

The EU’s MiCA Deadline as a Filtration Mechanism

What the GENIUS and CLARITY Acts Bring

Africa’s Compliance Bar Is Rising and So Is the Ambition of Its Operators

What Comes Next?

#13: Nigeria has a Banking License Problem

Hello Builder 👋,

The Pattern Didn’t Start This Month

Why Are MFBs at The Forefront?

Ghana Faced the Same Question. It Chose a Different Answer.

In Other Words…

The Big Take

What This Means for Builders

Beth’s Corner

Quick Data Drop

In Other News

Fintech Opportunities

BIF Insider

Join Builders in Fintech (BIF)

Share Your Story on AFL

That’s All, Builder

Do you want BIF merch?

What’s the catch?

Here are some tips:

#SD 8: The Jobs Africans Are Hiring Stablecoins For

Job One: Help me get paid without losing time and money to the system

Job Two: I need to hedge against value erosion and reach markets my local currency can’t touch.

How Jobs Done Create New Jobs

What’s Next?

#SD 7: How African Stablecoin Operators Are Building Global Trust

The Week’s Moves: Two Operators, One Direction

Yellow Card in Lugano: What the Swiss Move Actually Signals

Ripple and Flutterwave: The Distribution Problem, Solved

What This Means for the Ecosystem

What’s Next?

#12: How the New NIMC Act Could Change Nigerian Fintech

Hello Builder 👋,

Before We Start…

#1: Your Identity Is Becoming More Valuable Than Ever

#2: Fintechs Won’t Just Verify Identity Anymore. They’ll Build Around It.

#3: The Real Product Is Trust

In Other Words…

The Big Take

What Does This Mean for Builders?

Beth’s Corner

Quick Data Drop

In Other News