With 42 currencies and limited direct convertibility, Africa loses billions to outdated cross-border payment systems. Betaling is changing that by building a stablecoin-powered infrastructure for fast, affordable, and local trade payments.
The $5 billion problem holding Africa’s trade hostage
Intra-African trade accounts for 15% of the continent’s total trade volume, far behind regions like Europe or Asia. One of the biggest roadblocks is the foreign exchange (FX) trap caused by Africa’s 42 currencies and 861 possible currency pairs; most of which can’t be exchanged directly. This means that a large percentage of intra-African payments have to be routed through a third currency, typically the U.S. dollar, leading to costly conversion fees, delays, and failed transactions.
According to the African Development Bank, this inefficiency costs African economies as much as $5 billion annually. It slows down the continent’s economic integration, keeps millions of small businesses underbanked, and complicates already difficult trade processes.
How Betaling was born
In 2017, Tomi Ashimolowo and Emmanuel Abiodun were not thinking about fixing Africa’s foreign exchange bottlenecks. They both were just students in Kenya, helping out friends and family in Nigeria who needed to send money across borders to pay school fees, rent, and hospital bills. Their attention was inevitably drawn to a common problem that these people experienced: the traditional banking system in Nigeria was failing them. Transfers were slow, unreliable, and painfully expensive.
Ashimolowo and Abiodun decided to improvise and tap into a network of diplomat friends with access to foreign currency. They then began moving money using a simple, trust-based workaround: converting Naira to Dollars or Kenyan Shillings and settling payments locally through mobile money or bank transfers. It was fast, and it worked.
Requests started piling up beyond tuition or emergencies, to business payments. Nigerian entrepreneurs wanted to pay Kenyan vendors, designers, billboard agencies. And they kept coming back to Ashimolowo and Abiodun because they got it done.
“They trusted me to get it done, and the banking system didn’t give them any better options,” says Ashimolowo.
Around the same time, Tomi’s friend Seye Obadeyi was working at Equity Bank Kenya. There, Obadeyi was deep in East Africa’s digital payments system, helping to drive regional integration efforts and working on card-acquiring infrastructure in partnership with Fintech hoping to do business in the region and also on the PAPSS (the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System) partnership with Afreximbank.
Though on different paths, all three men were circling the same core problem: moving money seamlessly across African borders.
Then COVID hit and with it, a boom in cross-border business between Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya. The FX problem became impossible to ignore.
“That’s when we realised this wasn’t just a side hustle,” says Obadeyi. “There was a real infrastructure gap and billions of dollars stuck in between.”
From this realisation, Betaling was born. It was an attempt to reimagine how cross-border payments should work in Africa: simple and fast.
Proof of concept
The earliest version of Betaling was a WhatsApp group, a spreadsheet, and people who trusted the three friends to move money across African borders quickly.
Using their network of diplomat contacts to access foreign currency, Ashimolowo and Abiodun handled liquidity manually. Settlements were made through local bank transfers or mobile money in Nigeria and Kenya while the team charged a small margin.
Word soon spread, especially among small and mid-sized businesses. These were African entrepreneurs who needed to pay people across the continent, and no one else was doing it faster or more affordably.
Pilot Version
As demand surged, Betaling evolved, still without a formal tech platform. To meet growing cross-border needs, the team began tapping into stablecoin liquidity, leveraging USDT through Over-the-Counter (OTC) dealers operating on WhatsApp. They opened wallets on Binance and partnered with local platforms like Monirates and work with OTC desks at organization’s like Fincra, giving businesses access to dollar liquidity when banks couldn’t deliver.
Soon, Betaling was providing services to not just directly to customers but also to licensed International Money Transfer Operators (IMTOs) in Nigeria. Betaling processed over $5.3 million in transaction volume and generated $64,000 in revenue, with nearly 75% of their customers coming back.
Market-ready version
Today, Tomi Ashimolowo, Emmanuel Abiodun, and Seye Obadeyi are working on the third and most ambitious version of Betaling: a full-stack cross-border payments and peer-to-peer FX trading platform, built specifically for enabling trade for African businesses.
This next iteration will bring together real-time currency exchange, peer-to-peer marketplace dynamics, and cross-border payment infrastructure, wrapped in a layer of competitive rate discovery and automated settlement. Betaling’s platform addresses the high costs and poor rates plaguing traditional international money transfers while also enabling users to set their own exchange rates, trade directly with each other, and execute seamless cross-border payments to customers or vendors.
By combining currency trading, international payments, and a peer-to-peer marketplace into one unified platform, Betaling eliminates the friction in global currency exchange while making it possible for traders to not just complete cross-border transactions but to also generate profit by becoming their own currency traders when they have excess foreign currency to monetise.
This comprehensive approach aims to provide a more cost-effective and profitable alternative to traditional banks and money transfer services for individuals and businesses navigating the complexities of international currency exchange.
Driving Africa’s trade revolution, not just processing payments
Betaling is architecting the financial infrastructure that will unlock Africa’s trillion-dollar trade potential. While traditional payment providers focus on moving money from point A to point B, Betaling is solving the fundamental FX bottlenecks that prevent 80% of African trade transactions from happening in the first place. The platform creates liquidity pools, enables price discovery, and turns businesses into active participants in currency markets.
The ripple effect extends far beyond individual transactions. By solving the currency fragmentation that keeps intra-African trade at a mere 15%, Betaling is positioning itself as critical infrastructure for the AfCFTA’s goal of boosting continental trade to $1 trillion by 2030. Every seamless currency exchange, every cross-border payment, and every business Betaling connects contributes to Africa’s economic integration. In addition to reducing the $5 billion annual loss from inefficient FX systems, Betaling is redirecting that capital back into productive trade, job creation, and economic growth across the continent.
Why we are fundraising
Without proprietary tech, Betaling has already processed over $5.3 million in transaction volume, bootstrapped from day one. The current traction has validated that the FX problem is real, and there is willingness to pay for a better solution.
Betaling is now raising a $250,000 pre-seed round on a $2.5M valuation cap via a post-money SAFE.
The funds will power their platformised MVP build, including P2P matching, USDT rails, B2B dashboards, and ERP/API integrations, licensing efforts and liquidity operations.
Interested investors, partners, or fintech leaders who believe in a connected Africa, can contact Betaling at support@betaling-africa.com
