Oluwatobi Ajayi built Ivorypay, a stablecoin payment infrastructure provider, on the conviction that Africa’s payment challenge is not simply the lack of another consumer-facing app but the a
Oluwatobi Ajayi built Ivorypay, a stablecoin payment infrastructure provider, on the conviction that Africa’s payment challenge is not simply the lack of another consumer-facing app but the absence of reliable infrastructure for businesses to receive, convert, hold, and settle value across markets.
His view is that African businesses can already find customers beyond their home markets. What is unresolved is how they can receive payment quickly, cheaply, and scalably.
Consumer payments have advanced. Cross-border business settlement still lags.
Africa’s consumer payments story has largely been told already. Mobile money turned phones into bank accounts for hundreds of millions of people; globally, the rails processed more than $2 trillion in 2025 across 2.3 billion registered accounts, according to GSMA, with much of that growth concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa.
What hasn’t been solved to the same degree is the business-to-business (B2B) and cross-border layer sitting just above it: getting paid by a customer in another country, paying a supplier abroad, holding value without losing it to currency depreciation, and reconciling all of it without a finance team drowning in spreadsheets.
That gap costs real money.
The World Bank’s most recent Remittance Prices Worldwide data puts the average cost of sending money into Sub-Saharan Africa at 8.46% in the third quarter of 2025, still the most expensive region in the world for that kind of transfer, with banks alone averaging close to 15% as a remittance channel.
For a small exporter or a subscription business trying to compete globally, that is a structural nightmare before a single unit is sold.
Stablecoins have moved into that gap faster than most traditional players anticipated. Chainalysis estimates Sub-Saharan Africa received more than $205 billion in on-chain value between July 2024 and June 2025, up roughly 52% year-on-year, with Nigeria alone accounting for about $92.1 billion of it.
Oluwatobi is careful to separate that trend from crypto speculation. “We are not building for people who want to speculate. We are building for businesses that need to get paid,” he says.
For him, the dream payment infrastructure is such that merchants never have to notice the blockchain plumbing, no wallets to manage, and no chains to understand, just money that shows up where it's supposed to in a currency they can spend. “The best payment infrastructure disappears into the business workflow. A merchant should not need to understand chains or wallets to receive value efficiently,” he argues.Why the local bridge matters more than the railStablecoin rails only matter to African businesses once they connect to what those businesses already use: local bank accounts, mobile money wallets, treasury tools, and clean reporting.
“They matter because they solve a practical problem: moving dollar-linked value across borders faster than many traditional rails allow.” That’s why Oluwatobi believes that compliance isn’t a cost bolted onto a payments product once regulators start asking questions, but is part of the product itself.
“Regulation is not outside the product. For business payments, compliance, reporting, and risk controls are part of the infrastructure,” the founder says.
It’s a live tension: the IMF, in a June 2026 note on Nigeria, described stablecoins as having grown from a niche crypto habit into a genuine cross-border payments channel for households and small businesses while also flagging reduced demand for local currencies, harder-to-monitor transaction flows, and illicit finance risk.
Oluwatobi’s answer isn’t to dismiss that concern but to build KYC, sanctions screening, and transaction monitoring from day one rather than retrofit them later.
What better settlement actually unlocksStrip away the protocol talk, and the opportunity spans far more than merchant checkout.
A SaaS company gets to bill customers in three currencies for API usage without absorbing card fees on every call. An exporter gets paid in minutes instead of weeks and can price against a supplier’s real costs rather than a currency buffer.
A marketplace collects from buyers in one market while settling vendors, drivers, or agents in several others on the same day. An NGO moves programme funds across borders without losing a week to reconciliation. A media or data business monetises an archive or a research feed directly, rather than defaulting to advertising or a blunt subscription paywall.
Oluwatobi Ajayi, founder and CEO of IvoryPayNone of that requires any of those businesses to think about crypto at all. That’s the real argument for treating this as infrastructure rather than a fintech feature. The same settlement layer that gets an exporter paid faster is what lets a media company monetise its archive or an NGO move funds across multiple markets without the reconciliation drag.
“The future of African payments will not be one rail,” Oluwatobi explains. It will be a bridge between local methods, global money, and programmable settlement.”
Where Ivorypay fitsIvorypay is one of the clearer examples of that infrastructure being built locally.
Since launching in 2022, Ivorypay has developed stablecoin payment infrastructure that allows businesses to collect payments, manage digital-dollar balances, convert funds, and settle into local bank and mobile money rails across African markets, with bank and mobile money settlement options available across supported markets, including integrations with services such as M-Pesa, MTN MoMo, and Airtel Smartcash.
Now available across 16 African countries. The company says it has processed more than $500 million in payment volume and onboarded over 16,000 merchants. With a consumer-facing peer-to-peer app, Ivorypay also launched Duffle, its consumer-facing payments product, in 2025 to extend the same local-currency conversion to everyday transfers.
Oluwatobi also believes the same infrastructure will become increasingly important as commerce becomes more automated and software-driven.
“Cross-border payments have historically depended on manual approvals, fragmented institutions, and settlement systems that were not designed for real-time digital commerce,” he says, arguing that AI agents transacting on businesses’ behalf will need rails that “settle rapidly, remain economical at smaller transaction values, and work across borders.” Oluwatobi’s caution here is less about the technology and more about who it serves: open protocols don’t localise themselves.
Without local settlement, compliance, and payout rails underneath them, agentic commerce risks becoming one more layer of the internet that works well in San Francisco and London while African businesses remain locked out of collecting on demand, which they can already see coming.
The question this piece keeps circling back to is: since African businesses can sell globally but can’t collect, convert, and settle globally with the same ease, who ends up capturing the value of Africa’s own commerce boom?
