Africa’s cross-border payments landscape is changing rapidly. As businesses increasingly trade and operate across multiple markets, moving money across borders has become more important, but also more complicated. Different currencies, banking systems, foreign-exchange rules and regulatory requirements can make what should be a straightforward payment a difficult process.
Recent decisions by international payment providers to restrict or withdraw services from some African markets have also highlighted just how important compliance and strong regulatory relationships are to keeping payment channels open. At the same time, new technologies such as stablecoins are promising faster and potentially more efficient ways of moving and settling money across borders, raising fresh questions about how innovation and regulation can work together.
For businesses, the issue ultimately goes beyond speed and cost. They need to know that their payments provider can operate reliably across markets, manage regulatory requirements and ensure their money reaches the intended recipient securely and on time.
Ola Oyetayo, Co-Founder and CEO of Verto has discussed the changing landscape of cross-border payments in Africa, why compliance is becoming a competitive advantage for fintechs, what recent market exits by payment providers tell us about the importance of regulatory preparedness, and whether technologies such as stablecoins can deliver on their promise without adding new risks for businesses.
- We have recently seen several international payment platforms restrict or withdraw services in Kenya, against the backdrop of the country’s FATF grey-listing. What does that tell us about the importance of compliance in keeping cross-border payment channels open?
Access to a market is not just about having the technology to process a payment. You also need the licences, banking relationships and controls that allow you to continue operating there.
Grey-listing shows that a payment channel survives on relationships and regulatory groundwork as much as on how fast you can move money. Extra scrutiny follows a grey-listing decision across the whole financial system. Banks and payment providers have to run deeper due diligence, understand transactions in more detail, and show regulators they’re managing risk properly.
That makes operating in the market harder, but our answer isn’t to cut corners. It’s to invest in understanding the market and the customers we serve.
For an exporter or finance team choosing a cross-border payments provider, that adds another consideration alongside price and speed: will this provider still be able to serve this corridor as the regulatory environment changes?
- Why do you believe compliance can actually be a competitive advantage for a fintech?
In cross-border payments, trust is part of the product itself.
If you are a CFO moving significant amounts of money between markets, you need to know your provider understands who it’s dealing with, where the money is going, and what’s required in each jurisdiction.
We don’t treat compliance as something bolted on once the product is built. It’s built into how we design things from day one. Get that right, and it gives customers, banks and other partners the confidence to work with you. That confidence is what lets you grow.
- You have previously spoken about Verto turning away the vast majority of businesses that apply to use the platform. Isn’t that an unusual approach for a growth company?
It probably sounds counterintuitive because fintech growth is often discussed in terms of how quickly you can acquire customers.
But the number of customers you onboard is not the only measure of growth. The quality and sustainability of those relationships matter as well.
If we cannot get comfortable with a business, understand its activity or manage the risk associated with a particular transaction, then we would rather say no. For us, that discipline is important because we are trying to build infrastructure that banks, regulators and large enterprises can rely on over the long term.
- Does that level of scrutiny risk making fintech less accessible to African businesses?
There is an important distinction between strict rules and needlessly complicated ones.
The goal isn’t to make it harder for legitimate companies to access financial services. Quite the opposite: good technology should make onboarding and verification faster, not slower.
But there are certain things a payments provider simply has to understand: who owns the company, what it does, why it is moving money and where those funds are going.
The opportunity for fintech is to make those checks happen as smoothly as possible. A customer should not have to choose between a good experience and a provider that takes risk seriously.
- Why is compliance particularly difficult in African cross-border payments?
There is no single African regulatory environment.
You can move money between two neighbouring countries and still be dealing with different currencies, banking systems, licensing requirements, foreign-exchange rules and approaches to financial crime.
Newer rails do not remove those differences either. Stablecoins, for example, may provide a more direct way to move value between markets, but you still need to understand how the transaction is treated on both sides, how you convert into local currency and what permissions are required.
That is why cross-border payments have to be understood corridor by corridor. A payment rail can connect two markets technically, but you still need permission and the right controls to move money between them responsibly.
- We have seen international payment providers restrict or withdraw services from some African markets when compliance becomes more difficult. What lesson should businesses take from that?
The cheapest payment option is worthless if the provider can’t still serve that corridor six months from now.
If you are an importer relying on a particular corridor to pay suppliers every week, continuity matters. You want to know whether your provider is properly licensed, understands the markets involved and has sustainable relationships with its banking partners.
For enterprise customers especially, reliability and continuity matter enormously.
- Does stricter regulation favour established banks over fintechs?
Not necessarily. It favours whoever has actually invested in understanding risk, bank or fintech.
Banks have operated in regulated environments for a very long time, so there is obviously a lot fintechs can learn from them. Fintechs, on the other hand, can design their systems and workflows around today’s requirements rather than adapting older processes.
That becomes particularly relevant as the range of payment rails expands. Stablecoins may create new options for settling cross-border transactions, but providers still have to demonstrate to banks and regulators that they understand the flows involved and can manage them properly.
I don’t really see this as banks versus fintechs. Both are part of the same financial ecosystem, and increasingly they will need to work together.
- Stablecoins are being promoted as a way of making cross-border payments faster and cheaper. Do compliance requirements risk limiting their potential?
Stablecoins can potentially improve what happens behind the scenes of a cross-border payment, particularly around settlement. But using a different rail does not remove the responsibilities that come with moving money.
You still need to understand who is sending the funds, who is receiving them, what the transaction represents and what happens when that value needs to move into or out of local currency.
For our customers, what matters isn’t whether a stablecoin sat in the background. A corporate treasurer wants to know the supplier got paid, the exchange rate was clear, and the transaction met the relevant rules.
If stablecoins can help deliver that more efficiently, they have a very useful role to play. The customer should not have to take on additional complexity to benefit from them.
- Some fintech founders argue that regulation moves too slowly and holds back innovation. Do you agree?
There are certainly situations where regulation has to catch up with technology. That is inevitable when innovation is moving quickly.
If you want banks, multinational corporations and large African companies to adopt new financial rails, they need certainty about how those rails are governed.
The better conversation is about making regulation clear, proportionate and able to evolve. Payment providers also have a responsibility to engage regulators early, rather than building first and asking permission afterwards.
- So where should fintechs draw the line between moving quickly and being cautious?
There are areas where fintechs should experiment aggressively and areas where you simply cannot afford to take shortcuts.
We should be testing new products and looking at new ways to make payments faster and more efficient. Stablecoins are part of that conversation because they could make settlement more direct in certain corridors.
But when you are handling somebody else’s money, security, safeguarding and understanding the parties to a transaction have to remain consistent.
Innovation should make the customer’s life easier. It should not transfer regulatory or financial risk from the fintech onto the customer.
- At the same time, Kenya’s financial system is becoming more sophisticated, with developments such as the approval of its first locally domiciled ETF. As African financial markets mature, will compliance become an even bigger differentiator for fintechs?
Yes, because the type of customer you are trying to serve changes as the market develops.
Kenya is a good example of how quickly financial markets across the continent are developing. You have more sophisticated investment products, deeper domestic markets and companies operating across a growing number of countries.
That changes what customers expect from financial-services providers. A CFO managing operations across Kenya, Uganda and Nigeria needs more than a fast transaction. They need transparency around FX, strong governance, reliable settlement and confidence in the counterparties they are working with.
A larger corporate or financial institution will also want to understand how you are regulated, who your banking partners are, how you manage risk and whether your processes can stand up to their own due diligence. That matters if you want to move from serving smaller companies to becoming a long-term financial partner to larger enterprises. The bar is simply higher.
So I see this less as a question of having the strictest controls and more about being able to meet the standards of the customers and partners you want to work with. As African companies become larger and more regional, the competitive bar rises. Price and speed will remain important, but they become less distinctive on their own. The providers that can meet the standards expected by larger companies and financial institutions will be better placed to grow alongside them.
- Looking ahead, will compliance become more or less important as Africa’s payments market matures?
It will come down to who can combine that speed with the trust needed to serve serious companies at scale, and for us, that means managing complexity quietly in the background rather than pushing it onto the customer.
The market is only getting more interconnected: more companies operating across borders, more payment systems connecting to each other, technologies like stablecoins becoming part of the plumbing. That’s a real opportunity, but it also means providers have to track increasingly complex flows of money.
A company shouldn’t need to become an expert in payment rails, regulation or settlement just to pay a supplier abroad. Our job is to manage that complexity so the customer gets something much simpler instead: confidence that their money will arrive securely, compliantly and on time.
