Africa’s payments infrastructure needs to be rebuilt from scratch

Sending money across Africa should not be complicated.

Yet for millions of people on the continent, a cross-border transfer still passes through a chain of intermediary banks, each one adding a fee, a delay, and a potential failure point.

Maplerad is solving Africa’s cross-border problem

According to the World Bank, remittances to Africa totalled over $92.2 billion in 2024. In the same year, Sub-Saharan Africa remained the most expensive region in the world to send money, averaging 8.45% to transfer just $200. The UN’s target is 3%. The global average sits at 6.4%. In certain corridors, costs hit 12.7%.

That gap is not a market inefficiency. It is a structural failure. And that is the insight Obinna Chukwujioke, co-founder and CEO of Maplerad, kept coming back to. The problem was not that African payments were slow or expensive. It was that the underlying systems did not talk to each other. “Payment systems across Africa are fragmented and don’t talk to each other,” he said in a press release seen by Condia. Most people trying to fix this have built an app. Chukwujioke and his co-founder, Miracle Anyanwu, built something beneath it.

In 2020, they launched Wirepay, a consumer payments product. By 2022, they had seen enough. The surface level was not the problem. The infrastructure was. So they pivoted, rebranded to Maplerad, and opened their technology stack to developers, startups, and enterprises as a Banking-as-a-Service platform. Compliance, card issuance, multi-currency wallets, foreign exchange, automated payouts — all of it, through a single suite of APIs.

The idea was not complicated. It was just hard to execute. According to the company, a business can now launch a fully compliant fintech product on Maplerad’s platform in under five minutes. Since its 2022 relaunch, Maplerad says it has processed over $500 million in transactions, serves more than 3,000 businesses, and reaches over five million end users across Africa. Chipper, Remitly, and Nombank are among the companies using the platform. Maplerad operates in six countries: Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, and Cameroon, and partners with MTN and Orange across the region.

Now consider what they are building into.

Africa has 54 countries, each with its own central bank, regulatory framework, and banking network. There is no unified settlement system. Cross-border business-to-business payments represent an estimated $300 billion to $500 billion annual market. Researchers call it “vastly underserved.” As of 2024, only 11 of Africa’s 36 live instant payment systems supported cross-border transactions at all. Every single corridor in Sub-Saharan Africa had average transaction costs above 3%. Everyone.

Research from Harvard Business School found that reducing payment friction by 50% could create between 900,000 and 1.1 million remote jobs across the continent and add $3 billion to remote-work exports. For every 10% increase in transaction costs, remote-work exports shrink by 4.7%.

The connection between payment infrastructure and economic opportunity is not theoretical. It is direct and measurable. The broader stakes are real. The African Continental Free Trade Area is one of the most consequential economic agreements in the continent’s history. But, on paper, trade agreements require payment infrastructure in practice. Cross-border payments are the plumbing. Without them working reliably and affordably, AfCFTA remains an aspiration rather than an architecture.

How Maplerad differs in Nigeria’s fintech ecosystem

Maplerad is not the only company working on this problem. It operates in a vertical known as banking-as-a-service, similar to Anchor. Understanding what this means requires drawing a clear line between it and players like Mono.

“Think of Maplerad as the infrastructure that lets a company launch a financial product quickly,” Benjamin Dada, a fintech expert and Condia publisher, explains. If a lender like Fairmoney wanted to expand into Kenya, for instance, it would ordinarily face the long and expensive process of securing licenses and building bank partnerships from scratch. 

Maplerad removes that friction entirely. “Instead of going through all the time and stress, they would just use a banking as a service provider like Maplerad to get up and running quickly.”

Anchor sits in the same category. Mono does not. “Mono’s core is not banking as a service,” Dada says. “Mono is more of an open banking player.” Where Maplerad helps a business launch a product with a bank account at its centre, Mono helps move money between two existing accounts or stores of value. It is a meaningful distinction.

The difference in business models is just as telling. Maplerad is B2B, selling directly to businesses like Fairmoney, which then serve their own customers. That makes the full chain B2B2C. Mono also sells to businesses, but it is not in the business of helping them build banking products. “Mono is just trying to help you move money between two accounts,” Dada says. Same starting point, entirely different destination.

And the challenges ahead are real. Regulatory environments across the continent remain complex and inconsistent. High foreign exchange margins continue to inflate costs in corridors where correspondent banking still dominates. The G20 aims to reduce the global average cost of remittances to 3% by 2027. 

For Sub-Saharan Africa, with an average of 8.45% in 2024, that target requires sustained infrastructure investment, policy reform, and the kind of unglamorous technical work that does not make headlines but does make systems function. Building the rails is one thing. Getting every train to run on them is another.

Last updated: May 24, 2026