Table Of Content
Key Takeaways:
- IvoryPay CEO Oluwatobi Ajayi argues that Africa’s payments future will not be dominated by a single payment method.
- Instead, banks, mobile money, cards, stablecoins, and blockchain infrastructure will coexist, each serving different use cases.
- His perspective reflects a broader shift across African fintech, where the focus is moving from replacing legacy finance to integrating with it.
When we talk about crypto and its place in African finance, we talk about it as if it were a contest, and for good reason. Often, when new technology enters the market, we see it replace existing tech.
We talk about it as cryptocurrency vs. fiat, mobile money vs. card, blockchain vs. “the old system.” Oluwatobi Ajayi, CEO and co-founder of stablecoin payment infrastructure company IvoryPay, thinks that framing is a distraction.
His argument, laid out in a recent TechNext founder spotlight, is that African businesses have little trouble finding customers beyond their home markets. The unresolved problem is how to get paid by those customers quickly, cheaply, and at scale. In other words, a lack of inclusive and reliable financial infrastructure.
Consumer payments in Africa have largely already been solved. In 2025 alone, mobile money processed more than $1.4 trillion in Africa across 92 billion transactions.
Cross-border settlement for remittances and businesses, however, is the layer that still lags. Cross-border transactions through traditional channels can cost between 7% and 20% of the transaction value and take multiple days to settle.
Why “One Rail” Was Never Going to Work
Africa doesn’t have a single payment system; it has several. Mobile money is the default across East Africa, and instant bank transfers in Nigeria. In more formalised retail segments, people use cards. Cash still accounts for an estimated 90% of everyday commerce.
The World Bank puts the average cost of sending money into Sub-Saharan Africa at over 8% as of 2025. Sending to East Africa can reach as high as 9.9%, and to Southern Africa, 8.9%. This makes it the most expensive region to send money to and within. The World Bank estimates that cheaper cross-border payments could improve trade and generate USD 292 billion in income gains for Africa.
Stablecoins have filled that specific gap faster than most traditional players expected. Chainalysis estimates Sub-Saharan Africa received more than $205 billion in on-chain value between July 2024 and June 2025, a 52% growth from the previous year.
According to data from Yellowcard, stablecoins accounted for 43% of total cryptocurrency transaction volume in sub-Saharan Africa in 2024.
Ajayi believes the growth, in his framing, reflects businesses that need to get paid, not traders chasing yield. The data supports this framing.
From Crypto vs Banks to Crypto + Banks + Compliance
Ajayi’s core thesis is that the winning infrastructure companies won’t be the ones trying to replace banks, mobile wallets, or card networks. They’ll be the ones connecting them all. In his words, “the future of African payments will not be one rail. It will be a bridge between local methods, global money, and programmable settlement.”
That’s a meaningfully different posture from the “crypto disrupts finance” narrative that dominated the industry’s early years. It treats stablecoins as a settlement layer that sits beneath existing systems rather than as a replacement product competing for the same customers.
Ajayi goes further, arguing that compliance must be built into that layer from the start. KYC, sanctions screening, and transaction monitoring should be core product features, he argues, not afterthoughts.
“Regulation,” he says, “is not outside the product. For business payments, they are part of the infrastructure.”
Across Africa, regulators seem to acknowledge stablecoins have become useful and part of the financial infrastructure. Instead of maintaining the same prohibitory stance they had in the beginning, they’re developing regulatory infrastructure for these channels.
Despite these improvements, there are genuine concerns about the impact of stablecoins on monetary policy. Concerns have been raised about reduced demand for local currencies and harder-to-monitor transaction flows.
IvoryPay Reflects a Much Larger Industry Trend
IvoryPay’s positioning lines up with a wave of similar infrastructure plays across the continent.
Flutterwave has secured investments from both Ripple and Circle Ventures to push RLUSD-powered and USDC settlements. Visa, M-PESA, and Onafriq have piloted stablecoin-based payments in the DRC. SCRYPT, a Swiss-licensed digital asset infrastructure provider, recently expanded into East Africa. HyperFX has used cNGN for instant FX settlement, and AEON has pushed crypto payments into Zambia.
None of these are framed as attacks on banks or mobile money. Nearly every one of them is framed as integration, a plug-in settlement layer, not a rival front end.
What This Means for African Fintech Builders
A few implications follow for anyone building payment products on the continent.
Closed systems are a dead end. A wallet or app that only talks to itself has a shrinking addressable market. Products increasingly need to interact with banks, mobile money, local switches, and international settlement networks simultaneously.
Infrastructure, not consumer wallets, is the bigger opportunity. Consumer-facing apps are a crowded field. APIs, treasury services, settlement, FX conversion, and embedded finance are where new value is. IvoryPay tapped into this when it built merchant-facing settlement tools before layering a consumer app, Duffle, on top in 2025.
Stablecoins are becoming invisible. The strongest infrastructure disappears into the workflow. A merchant using IvoryPay’s rails shouldn’t need to know or care that a stablecoin conversion happened in the background. It should just look like money arriving faster and cheaper than it used to.
The Missing Piece: Interoperability
Ajayi’s clearest insight may be the simplest one: Africa doesn’t obviously need another wallet. It needs infrastructure that connects the systems that already exist; mobile money to stablecoin, bank to stablecoin, stablecoin to merchant, merchant back to bank.
Ajayi sees the next frontier as software and AI agents transacting on businesses’ behalf, which will need rails that settle in seconds and remain economical even at small transaction sizes. This use case is what IvoryPay has already begun building for through emerging machine-to-machine payment standards.
Why This Matters
The conversation among Africa’s fintech builders has moved past the question of whether crypto will replace banks.
The more useful question now is how blockchain-based settlement complements existing financial systems to make cross-border payments faster, cheaper, and more connected.
