For decades, African economies and consumers have relied on global financial solutions providers. Among the most consequential of these has been the remittance industry. For Africa, as with many emerging markets, remittances are not just a niche financial product but are a lifeline. In 2024, according to the World Bank, over $56 billion flowed into Sub-Saharan Africa in remittances, approximately twice the level of overseas development assistance. The money sent home by diaspora members funds school fees, healthcare, housing, and small businesses. Yet despite their scale and importance, the cost of sending $200 to sub-Saharan Africa averaged close to 9% in the first quarter of 2025 , well above the global average of 6.4%. Remittance products were designed elsewhere, optimised for sending markets, and adapted to African realities late in the process. This brought about high fees, limited FX pricing visibility, inconsistent delivery, and limited integration into everyday financial life.
What has shifted over the past few years has been the rise of a growing number of African-born companies that now build remittance functionality on top of domestic and regional payments infrastructure, rather than treating Africa as a last-mile add-on. Among them are Tanzania-founded NALA , which positions itself around diaspora users sending money into African markets; Nigeria-based Moniepoint , which has extended its payments backbone into diaspora corridors; and Flutterwave , which addresses remittances alongside broader cross-border payments and merchant tools. To understand how this shift is playing out on the ground, we spoke directly with founders and investors building across these corridors.
What these companies share is not a single business model, but an orientation: remittances are treated as part of the payments infrastructure, not as a standalone development product. Moniepoint operates its remittance product, Money World, from within a vertically integrated financial group. The company holds both an EMI license in the UK and an IMTO license in Nigeria, meaning it owns the regulatory permissions on both ends of the corridor rather than renting them from partners, a structural advantage which the company says gives it better economics and more control over reliability. Where Moniepoint' s remittance product is built on infrastructure it owns within a single group, NALA has built its consumer product on top of Rafiki , a separate payments infrastructure business it operates that serves as the underlying payout and FX layer. Rafiki connects directly to banks and telco wallets across roughly thirteen or fourteen African markets and four Asian ones, and holds the relevant licenses in each. Similarly, Flutterwave treats remittances as part of a broader cross-border payments stack, not a standalone consumer product. Its business and remittance offerings rely on its own infrastructure, local rails, and licenses to move money across corridors.
These companies, along with other remittance businesses operating across the continent, serve Africa's estimated 200 million diaspora , helping channel tens of billions of dollars back to the continent each year. Yet Africa remains one of the most expensive regions in the world to send money to, even as fees edge down from their historical peaks.
“Many transfers are still rerouted through the dollar”, said Mallick Bolakale, CEO of StartButton , a merchant of record business. “Funds are first converted into USD, cleared through correspondent banks, and only then exchanged into the destination currency.” That extra FX leg, layered compliance checks, and dependence on a small number of global banks all add cost and friction, keeping prices stubbornly high for senders and recipients alike.
“While pricing and speed are important, users ultimately want to know that their money will arrive safely and that their recipients will have a smooth payout experience,” said Harvey Bahia, Head, Send App Business at Flutterwave. Bahia notes that trust and reliability tend to be the most important factors people optimise for in practice.
The inefficiencies that make cross-border money transfers to the continent so challenging are, for remittance companies, also their main source of revenue. Rather than relying on visible flat fees, most of the revenue is embedded in the foreign exchange, or FX spread. That is, the difference between the exchange rate a company can access in the wholesale market and the rate the customer actually sees on screen. The wider the gap, the more margin the operator captures. “People don't want to pay flat fees. The moment they see one, there is resistance. But many customers don't perceive exchange rates as a fee at all; they see it as the amount the recipient actually receives,” said Eddy Nicolai, Co-Founder and COO of NALA . On the GBP/NGN corridor, for instance, inward transfers might clear at around 1,800 naira to the pound. At the same time, outward flows trade closer to 1,968, a gap of roughly 120 naira per unit that a remittance operator active in both directions can capture as a spread.
Yet FX margins across African corridors have compressed sharply over the past five years, and customers will simply go elsewhere if a company’s rates are visibly off‑market. “Competition has certainly driven pricing transparency across the industry, which ultimately benefits consumers,” said Bahia. NALA ’s answer has been to innovate on bilateral flows. By earning on both the sending and receiving sides of a transaction, it can offset pressure on spreads without sacrificing headline rates.
That same margin squeeze is pushing remittance businesses to stack on additional products (savings, investments, and trading features) as retention and monetisation levers. These tools help extract more value from existing users and build stickiness beyond the one‑off transfer. LemFi has rolled out a “Send Now, Pay Later” credit product in the UK, while Raenest has added U.S. stock and ETF investing, offering fractional access to thousands of companies. “The remittance companies that survive and do really well will innovate beyond remittances and become more like a digital bank offering, to service their customers more holistically,” said Eddy.
Where defensibility may be built into African remittances
As more startups chase the same corridors, the question of moats becomes harder to avoid. In business, a moat refers to the structural advantages that make a company difficult to compete with or displace. "I wouldn't say financial services are one of those things with clear moats,” Eddy said. He claims that financial services (especially remittances) fall short of the classic moat categories. Switching costs, which might be the strongest candidate, are eroding as technical integrations become easier to build. While no hard moat exists yet, these remittance players agree that the closest thing to a durable advantage lies in building trust, owning local infrastructure, and capturing more of a customer's financial life over time. “There are layers to cross-border remittance that aren't visible from the outside. The relationships, the banking infrastructure, the operational instincts built from years of running real money through complex corridors,” notes Bahia. For Flutterwave , Bahia claims defensibility is built around strong coverage, deep local infrastructure across African markets, and a customer experience designed specifically for diaspora remittances. “In addition, integrations with local payment systems and banking partners across African markets enable reliable payout coverage and strong recipient experiences,” said Bahia.
Edidiong Uwemakpan, Moniepoint ’s Vice President of Corporate Affairs, points to the scale inside a closed ecosystem. Moniepoint 's payment partners can't afford to lose their volume, and internal rails mean its remittance product, MoneyWorld, pays less per transaction than any independent operator would. The remittance product also generates FX that Moniepoint needs operationally, so the business partially solves an internal problem before it even optimises for consumer economics. NALA' s answer to defensibility is Rafiki , its payout network. Rafiki connects banks, telco wallets, FX counterparties, and regulators across 17+ markets, built through years of operational presence, which they believe cannot be easily replicated. NALA now sells that infrastructure to other remittance operators, including MoneyGram, meaning the startup is simultaneously competing with and supplying the same market.
Both Moniepoint and NALA ’s strategies converge on the same underlying logic of owning more of the customer's financial activity over time. Moniepoint builds from the supply side through vertical integration. NALA builds from the demand side through product expansion into accounts, stablecoins, and cards. Flutterwave , meanwhile, anchors its position through breadth, leaning on deep local infrastructure, wide market coverage, and integrations with local payment systems and banking partners designed to make it indispensable at the payout layer across African markets.
Infrastructure, compliance, and the future of African remittances
Looking ahead, the next phase of growth in Africa's cross-border remittances is widely anticipated to hinge on whether players can combine licensing, access to FX liquidity, compliance infrastructure and broad payout coverage into a single operating model . If they can, the market could move beyond patchy, corridor-by-corridor expansion towards faster, cheaper and more reliable transfers at scale. “Improvements in global liquidity infrastructure could reduce friction in cross-border liquidity movement and improve speed and cost, particularly in markets where traditional correspondent banking is thin,” notes Bolakale. Progress in compliance infrastructure will be equally important, both to support innovation and to sustain trust and financial stability.
