In Africa, two worlds of fintech are growing side by side.
They’re so similar, yet so different.
One is local, older, and built on mobile money and digital payments.
It moves over USD 1.5 trillion each year.
And settles payments faster than what the Automatic Clearing House (ACH) does in the United States
Let’s call this the Old World.
The other is global, built on stable coins—digital currencies—and powers remittances and cross-border payments.
This one moved over USD 50 billion across Africa last year alone.
This is the New World.
There’s just one problem: both worlds don’t work well together.
But before I tell you why…
Let’s go see the Old World
Twenty years ago, most Africans kept their money in cash.
There were many banks around, but very little banking was happening.
As of 2005, there were over 700 commercial banks on the continent. Yet, only 15% of Africans had a bank account.
Cash was easier to carry, use, and receive.
Sure, banks could keep your money safe.
But they came with trade-offs:
You had to enter a bank building to use their services. Most bank branches were few and far between.
Using them was slow and painful.
And if the bank went under, so did people’s money
Societe Generale Nigeria, one of the early banks in Nigeria, went bankrupt in 2006, and thousands of Nigerians lost their money
So, African economies grew up on cash.
But that also came with problems.
Unless you were paying in person, it was pretty slow.
And carrying it around came with the risk of theft.
Then, in 2007, mobile money happened.
At that point, mobile phones had been growing explosively for almost ten years.
And telcos figured out something the banks hadn’t: SIM cards could act as mobile wallets.
People could keep money in these wallets and pay for things with it, bypassing cash and banks altogether.
M-PESA of Kenya and later Tanzania, was the first of this new breed of banking that worked out.
At the end of its first year, 2 million people had signed up.
And USD 53 million worth of payments had happened.
In 2007, MTN also launched its first mobile money service in Uganda, and it has grown into 200 million wallets across Africa today
Naturally, banks had no choice. Someone had just invented a faster, better alternative.
So, with the help of policymakers, banks in different African countries built their digital payment systems.
By the 2010s, they started going live.
Nigeria launched NIP (NIBSS Instant Payments) in 2011.
Kenya added PesaLink in 2014.
Ghana followed with GhIPSS Instant Pay in 2015.
And Francophone Africa layered mobile money on top of a shared CFA zone.
Sometimes, these systems were faster than what Europe or the United States had.
In Nigeria, NIP could (and still can) settle payments in under 10 seconds.
Meanwhile, ACH transfers in the USA take a whole business day…or more, if it’s Friday.
These local systems moved huge amounts, too.
NIP processed USD 702 billion in 2024.
South Africa’s Payshap handled over USD 5.6 billion last year.
And Pesalink in Kenya moved over USD 8.6 billion last year.
This is the old world of fintech.
And it built the foundation for every fintech app we use today. From mobile wallets to payments.
But powerful as it is, it had one major flaw.
Fragmentation, round one
Each country built its fintech rails and made them really good for local use.
But the problem is, they stopped at the border.
Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city, is 764 kilometres from Lagos. That’s a 12-hour drive.
If you wanted to send money from Lagos to someone in Abuja, you could do it in ten seconds.
On the other hand, Lagos is one hour away from Cotonou in Benin Republic. But sending money across could take days.
Badagry, the closest part of Lagos to the Benin Republic, is less than 20 minutes away. Yet, sending money across is a huge pain.
It’s probably faster to simply drive the money across.
This contradiction perfectly describes how local payments work in Africa.
They’re fast, powerful, but fenced off.
Now, this was fine when most payments happened within a country’s borders.
But today, thanks to the internet, that’s changing.
Most people now consume online services—like Uber, Bolt, or Spotify.
Many Africans now work remotely for companies abroad and need to get paid.
And businesses are doing trade globally now.
Africa traded USD 1.3 trillion with the world last year.
But for global companies looking in, getting paid in Africa looks like a mess.
You’re talking 500 banks, 277 mobile money wallets, 42 currencies, and many different rails.
There are many ways to pay and get paid in Africa, but the prevailing method changes depending on where you are.
As you can imagine, setting up payments in each market was costly and complex.
In 2016, when aggregators like Paystack and Flutterwave came around.
They bundled up different payment channels—cards, transfers, mobile money—and put them in one API.
Here’s how Flutterwave bundles a tedious process into a simpler one
So instead of setting up payments many times, businesses only had to do it once.
And this made it easier for businesses to get paid.
These aggregators quickly grew into some of the biggest fintechs in Africa.
But as they grew, one guy started to see the cracks.
One man, two worlds
David Nandwa started coding at age 9.
By age 19, he’d made it onto Flutterwave’s engineering team.
His job? Making sure all local payment rails stayed connected.
At 19, David had shipped many products and turned four of them into viable businesses.
But he was also a man steeped in two worlds.
While he was solving big problems here in Africa, he was also building software projects globally.
In 2020, he worked as a freelance dev when a remittance platform seized his salary.
His offence? Living in Africa, a place considered high risk for fraud.
He spent months trying to prove he earned his money legally.
That’s when he took up another way to get paid: crypto.
It’s a form of digital money that moves freely online, perfect for cross-border payments.
And it was growing in Africa:
USD 54 billion worth of stablecoins were received in Africa last year, mostly from abroad
It costs 1 percent in fees to receive money via stablecoins, compared to 8 percent with channels like Western Union
And Nigeria is the world’s biggest adopter of stablecoins, with 26 million users.
Seeing how well it worked, he decided to make an app so freelancers like him could get paid using crypto.
Later that year, he built HoneyCoin.
By 2021, the app was processing six figures in USD each month.
Then, he spotted a problem that looked familiar.
Crypto worked well for cross-border payments. But it still didn’t work well with traditional systems.
Flutterwave, for instance, had no way to receive crypto and pay out local currencies.
In a sense, payments were getting fragmented again.
He thought, Why not build a better aggregator?
So he made a new payment system.
One that merged both crypto and traditional payments. With this system:
Merchants could get paid however they wanted, whether through cards, bank transfers, or mobile money
Businesses and people could transact in any currency, whether traditional or stablecoins
Companies could issue bank accounts, wallets, and cards to their customers or employees.
He launched it, and it took off.
Today, HoneyCoin serves 326,000 people and 350 businesses.
And it processes over $150 million a month across 45 countries.
And David has even bigger plans for HoneyCoin.
For David, building HoneyCoin was about making payments feel…
Like using an internet browser
Think about all the things you can do on a browser.
You can text a friend, watch a video, and make a tweet.
But to get started, you only need to type a link, and a webpage pops up.
A lot happens underneath, but you only see the results.
That’s how David believes payments should work.
It shouldn’t matter which system you’re getting paid from.
As long as you’re paid.
It’s a big vision.
And he has just announced a USD 4.9 million raise that will help HoneyCoin chase this vision.
If it works out, he could finally build a bridge between the two worlds of payments in Africa.