Table Of Content
Key Takeaways:
- Accrue has launched Accrue Business, a stablecoin-powered banking platform designed for African SMEs.
- The platform enables businesses to hold stablecoins, create USD and EUR virtual accounts, send international payments, issue invoices, manage payroll, and pay suppliers from one interface.
- Rather than relying heavily on correspondent banks, Accrue continues to use its growing network of vetted liquidity agents operating across more than 15 African countries.
Accrue, the fintech behind the consumer remittance product Cashramp, has launched Accrue Business.
Accrue Business is a stablecoin-powered banking platform built for African small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The platform lets businesses hold stablecoins, open virtual USD and EUR accounts, collect international payments, issue invoices, run payroll, and pay suppliers from a single interface.
All of which is settled on the same agent-driven liquidity network that powers Accrue’s consumer app.
Accrue Expands Beyond Consumer Remittances
Accrue Business isn’t a brand-new idea. It’s easier to think of it as a public front for infrastructure Accrue has quietly run for businesses since 2024.
Using the same infrastructure that powers Cashramp, the new banking platform allows businesses to hold, send, and receive stablecoins. Businesses will also be able to collect international payments and pay suppliers across borders.
According to CEO Clinton Mbah, “We have seen a lot of success with individuals who haven’t had a reliable, affordable, and fast mobile money way for them to send money across Africa. Businesses started asking for the same thing.”
Accrue Business currently processes between $600,000 and $700,000 in monthly transaction volume. Its consumer product, Cashramp, accounts for $30–$50 million of the company’s $70–$100 million in lifetime volume.
The web platform has only been live for about two months. The target customer is modest: sole proprietors and small businesses that regularly move money across borders. A segment, Mbah says, larger banks continue to underserve.
Stablecoins Are Moving Up The Value Chain
Africa’s earliest stablecoin products were built around remittances, personal dollar savings, and crypto trading. What’s happening now is a shift toward solving operational business problems.
Fintechs are currently targeting problems related to international collections, treasury management, and multi-currency balances. Stablecoins are turning into business infrastructure, not just a digital asset.
Businesses have fundamentally different needs than individuals sending money home. A business needs predictable and timely settlement. They need reconciliation, invoicing, and payroll tools; the unglamorous back office of commerce.
With Accrue Business, Accrue is betting that the same rails that made remittances cheaper can be repackaged as the back office.
Why SMEs Are The Next Stablecoin Opportunity
African SMEs face a familiar set of frictions. Correspondent banking is often slow and expensive, as are settlements.
FX shortages, thin access to dollars, and payment systems that don’t communicate are commonplace as well; problems solved in part using stablecoins.
Consumer remittances were the entry point for stablecoins in Africa. However, business payments could end up being the larger prize.
Africa’s cross-border payments market processed about $329 billion in 2025 and could reach $1 trillion in 10 years. This scale and the projected 12% CAGR explain why nearly every serious African fintech now wants a stablecoin settlement layer somewhere in its stack.
The Agent Network Is The Real Product
Accrue’s actual differentiator is the underlying distribution model. Rather than relying primarily on banking partnerships or payment processors, Accrue is relying on humans.
Accrue is building on an agent network that already moves money across 15 African countries. While it uses stablecoins as the settlement infrastructure, local agents provide liquidity.
That network has grown from about seven countries to more than fifteen since Accrue’s $1.58 million seed round in January 2025. Its deepest liquidity pools are in Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, and Cameroon.
Accrue has invested some of the funds from its seed round to deepen liquidity in its agent network and expand into underserved markets.
According to Clinton Mbah,
We go where there’s minimal competition, where competitors won’t go because the costs are just too high. The agent network doesn’t have those same costs.
The company has since pushed into Francophone West Africa and is onboarding agents in East and Southern Africa.
The bet is that a distributed network of local liquidity providers, rather than a chain of correspondent banks, can absorb Africa’s fragmented payment corridors more cheaply and reliably. Stablecoins are the settlement rail; the agents are the moat.
A Growing Trend Across African Fintech
Accrue is not alone in reaching this conclusion.
Flutterwave just took a strategic investment from Circle Ventures and added USDC settlement across its platform. A move which comes weeks after Ripple invested in its Series E and tied RLUSD to its stablecoin products.
Flutterwave has framed itself as stablecoin-agnostic infrastructure. It lets merchants collect locally and settle in whichever digital dollar suits their treasury, rather than picking a single issuer to back.
Grey, Raenest, Yellow Card, and Onafriq are pursuing variations on the same theme, several as partners in the Circle Payments Network.
The pattern across all of them is the integration of stablecoins into settlement plumbing rather than selling them as standalone crypto products.
What This Means For African Businesses
If this model works at scale, businesses gain a few concrete advantages.
International collections can clear in minutes rather than days, sparing SMEs the wait for wire transfers. Holding value in stablecoins can reduce exposure to volatile local currencies for treasury purposes.
Cross-border expansion gets easier when a business doesn’t need a separate banking relationship in every market it operates in.
The bundling of virtual accounts, payroll, invoicing, cards, and settlement into a single interface suggests fintechs like Accrue are angling to become operating systems for businesses.
Challenges That Still Need Solving
None of this displaces banks overnight, and the agent model isn’t risk-free.
Regulatory treatment of stablecoins still varies sharply across African jurisdictions. Liquidity in smaller markets can be thin, which matters when an agent network depends on local partners actually holding sufficient currency to settle.
Compliance and KYC obligations scale in complexity as business customers replace individuals. Counterparty risk sits with the agents themselves. Enterprise customers will want more assurance around reliability and dispute resolution than a consumer sending $50 home typically demands.
Winning SME trust at scale requires more than speed.
