Each day, more African consumers and businesses are looking for ways to pay for products and services beyond their home markets.
For many, cards remain one of the simplest ways to do that. A card can turn a local bank account or wallet into a payment instrument for software subscriptions, advertising, travel, cloud services, and other products sold by merchants abroad.
But the experience has not always been seamless. African fintechs and businesses that issue cards have had to contend with changing regulations, foreign exchange constraints, declining transaction rates and, in some cases, providers abruptly ending services or making changes that leave businesses scrambling for alternatives.
That reliability problem is what Anchor says prompted it to rebuild its card infrastructure. The Nigerian banking-as-a-service platform has relaunched its card-issuing product, which it is calling Cards 2.0, after finding that reliability remained a major challenge for businesses that wanted to issue cards to their customers.
“Cards are a core part of how money is spent. The ability to transact internationally, not just locally, is where the real need is, and it’s the harder thing to build well,” Segun Adeyemi, CEO of Anchor, said.
“As our customers grew, we saw how important cards had become to their businesses and their users. We also saw where the previous product fell short. So we took the time to rebuild them inside our own unified rails. That’s what unlocks the reliability, the control, and the global reach this relaunch is really about,” he added.
Anchor goes back to the drawing board
Cards 2.0 is built for businesses that want to issue virtual USD Mastercard cards for online payments across borders.
The relaunched product supports higher spending volumes and allows businesses to issue multiple cards to a single user. Businesses can also create, fund, and freeze cards through a single API, while webhooks provide real-time visibility into card activity.
The pitch is that businesses that want to offer cards to their users should not have to build and maintain the underlying card infrastructure themselves.
That fits into Anchor’s broader positioning as a banking-as-a-service and embedded-finance infrastructure provider. The company provides APIs and tools that businesses can use to offer financial products, including accounts, payments, wallets, transfers, and cards without building all of the underlying infrastructure themselves.
Anchor launched in 2022 and has since expanded beyond its initial focus on bank accounts. In 2024, Adeyemi said the company processed more than ₦1 trillion in transactions and was working with more than 400 businesses, ranging from fintechs to large Nigerian corporates and global technology companies.
The company’s card strategy comes at a time when cross-border payments are becoming an increasingly important part of Africa’s digital economy.
For African consumers, international cards can be useful for everything from paying for Netflix and other subscriptions to purchasing software, booking travel, and paying merchants that do not accept local payment methods.
For businesses, cards can also become a way to manage international expenses, employee spending, and subscriptions without creating a bespoke payment process for every transaction.
The demand is not limited to traditional financial institutions either. Fintechs, commerce platforms, travel companies, marketplaces, and other technology businesses increasingly have reasons to embed financial products directly into their services. A company that already has a relationship with thousands of users may find that offering a card is a natural extension of its product.
This creates an opportunity for infrastructure providers such as Anchor. Rather than every business negotiating separately with banks, processors, card networks, and other providers, a BaaS platform can abstract much of that complexity behind an API.
The bet on one financial infrastructure stack
Cards also present a harder infrastructure problem than simply creating an account. A card transaction can involve the issuer, processor, card network, merchant, foreign exchange provider, and several layers of fraud and compliance controls. When a card is used internationally, the complexity can increase further.
For businesses issuing cards, therefore, the infrastructure underneath the product can matter just as much as the card itself.
That is where Anchor believes its new architecture gives it an advantage. The biggest change with Cards 2.0 is not necessarily the card customers see. It is where the card sits within Anchor’s infrastructure.
Cards now live on the same infrastructure that powers accounts, payments, wallets, and transfers for Anchor’s customers. The company says this unified architecture should make it easier for businesses to issue and manage cards alongside the other financial products they already offer.
For developers, that means card operations can be handled through the same infrastructure rather than being treated as a completely separate product.
The company is also betting that businesses would rather work with a single reliable provider than piece together several providers to keep their card programmes running.
That bet is particularly relevant in Africa, where fintech infrastructure has historically involved multiple layers of banking, payment and technology providers. When one layer changes its requirements or stops supporting a particular use case, businesses can be forced to migrate quickly.
Anchor’s strategy is therefore not simply about issuing more cards but about making cards another component of a broader financial infrastructure stack.
The timing may also be favourable. Africa’s payment landscape is moving rapidly beyond cash, although the dominant payment method differs significantly from one market to another.
In Nigeria, for example, bank transfers and instant payments are deeply embedded in everyday transactions, while mobile money plays a much larger role in several East African markets. Cards, however, remain important for international and online commerce, where global acceptance can make them particularly useful.
This means the opportunity for card infrastructure may not come from consumers abandoning other payment methods. Instead, cards can coexist with transfers, mobile money and digital wallets, each serving different use cases.
Anchor is betting that card usage will continue to grow and that more non-financial businesses will want to offer cards without taking on the cost and complexity of building card infrastructure themselves.
Cards 2.0 is therefore a bet on two trends at once: more Africans spending digitally across borders and more businesses embedding financial services into products that were not traditionally financial.
If those trends continue, the infrastructure underneath the card may become just as important as the card itself.
Last updated: September 15, 2026
