Shalom Osiadi founded a company out of a frustration that came too close to home. In 2022, as Naira lost value against the dollar, his parents, living in Ireland, watched the real estate properties they had bought in Nigeria before emigrating lose much of their value in dollar terms, even though nothing about the physical assets had changed.
The experience forced him to confront a problem he had already been thinking about as an entrepreneur: what happens to African businesses when the currency they earn becomes a liability rather than an asset?
That question became Osiadi’s obsession. In 2023, he founded Esca Finance, a company that provides foreign exchange (FX) for clients in emerging markets.
“I built a Euro‑backed stablecoin in 2018, which taught me financial engineering. I used that experience to build an ecosystem that lets businesses hedge currency exposure in volatile markets like Nigeria, using stablecoins and Bitcoin inside the infrastructure. That’s essentially what became Esca today,” said Osiadi.
From food delivery to fintech
Osiadi’s early life followed a straight line into technology and entrepreneurship. As a teenager in secondary school, he said he was obsessed with computers and taught himself basic programming from YouTube.
He said he built and sold a small business for his parents during a single summer holiday. That experience convinced him to abandon law and study computer science and business at Dublin City University (DCU) in Ireland.
With the software development experience he honed over the years, Osiadi tried to build his first business, Esca Menu. Having moved to Ireland for college, he saw an opportunity in the last-mile delivery market for users who didn’t like fast food and enjoyed slow-cooked meals.
Esca Menu was a home‑cooked food platform where home chefs and small restaurants listed meals, and customers ordered through an app. It offered cashback in stablecoins—digital currencies that are tied to real-world currencies such as the dollar—and Bitcoin instead of naira.
In 2022, the company expanded operations to Lagos, Nigeria, onboarding restaurants in dense neighbourhoods like Yaba after finding Ireland’s small Black and African population too limited for meaningful growth; though Ireland remained its legal base, said Osiadi.
Between August and October 2022, Esca Menu had onboarded about 130 restaurants, said Osiadi. But the transaction data did not match a typical food-marketplace pattern: there were many sign‑ups and repeated orders from the same restaurants, yet very few actual deliveries.
When the team spoke to merchants, a pattern emerged for Esca. In a market where the dollar‑naira rate was volatile, businesses were using Esca Menu to earn and hold stablecoins because they trusted those digital dollars more than the naira in their bank accounts.
The logic of the cashback made sense to them. If a restaurant kept all its profit in naira, every devaluation meant it paid more naira tomorrow for the same bag of rice. If part of its earnings stayed in stablecoins, it could convert those tokens back later into more naira than the original revenue, cushioning the impact of price increases.
The problem, for Osiadi, was that he was running a food business whose most engaged users were really there for FX protection.
In December 2022, he and his team decided to shut down the food layer of Esca Menu and keep only the financial engine beneath it. In January 2023, they partnered with Nigerian fintech PalmPay to extend the same crypto-cashback model to PalmPay’s point-of-sale (PoS) machines.
When a customer paid in a restaurant by transfer or card on a PalmPay PoS terminal, Esca’s software awarded stablecoins to the restaurant owner and, where configured, to the customer too. That moved Esca out of the business of handling orders and deliveries and into the business of helping restaurants convert part of their naira earnings into digital dollars.
The PalmPay integration took Esca from zero to $30,000 in total payment volume (TPV) by February 2023, according to Osiadi. Yet, the business depended on another company’s hardware. By August 2023, after it became clear that the startup could operate its own infrastructure, it walked away from PoS devices entirely and rebuilt itself as Esca Finance.
From that point, it became a pure FX and liquidity service provider: businesses wired local currency into Esca Finance and received dollars, euros, or cryptocurrencies out, using those positions to hedge against devaluation. In 2025, the company earned about $1.4 million in revenue, according to Osiadi. It is targeting $6 million in 2026.
Esca Finance now processes between $75 million and $120 million in monthly transactions, he added.
How Esca Finance works
Without a hedge, companies can lose money in dollar or euro terms after conversion, especially if they earn in local currencies that lose value.
Esca Finance sells a simple promise: it helps businesses stop losing money to bad exchange rates. It does this by taking the currency they earn in volatile markets and converting it into the hard currencies they actually report and plan in, such as dollars, euros, or pounds.
Osiadi describes Esca as “a currency management system for businesses in emerging markets,” targeting companies that earn in currencies like the naira or cedi but need to show their investors numbers in dollars or euros. It serves businesses and corporations in Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon, Mozambique, Angola, South Africa, and partners in Europe and Latin America.
When a company signs up, Esca Finance onboards it, runs know-your-business (KYB) and compliance checks, and gives it a Nigerian bank account inside Esca’s infrastructure. It also opens US Dollar (USD), British Pounds (GBP), and Euro accounts in Europe for that same client, even if the business is legally registered elsewhere.
The client can then set the rules: every naira that hits the Nigerian account can be automatically converted at the current rate and swept into a chosen hard currency balance. If the naira weakens before the books are closed, that revenue is already sitting in dollars or euros, and not exposed to the local FX swing.
The mechanism works in reverse for foreign companies that want to sell in Africa but never want to touch naira or other local currencies. A business in the United Kingdom (UK) or the United States (US) can collect payments from Nigerian customers into an Esca‑managed local account. Esca then auto‑converts those naira receipts and moves them into the client’s foreign currency account; its treasury stays in GBP or USD terms while its sales and business operations run in naira.
According to Osiadi, Esca serves global financial institutions. About 20% of its customers are remittance companies, cryptocurrency exchanges, and infrastructure platforms, including NALA, MoneyGram, and Bridge, the Stripe‑owned cryptocurrency infrastructure firm.
When a fintech buys liquidity on a particular African corridor from one of these partners, the African currency on the other side often comes from Esca’s books, said Osiadi. The rest of the company’s client list is made up of smaller corporations, including exporters and companies in sectors like energy, metals, and other medium‑ to high‑risk industries that have meaningful FX exposure.
“If I’m an Irish business with operations in Nigeria, my Nigerian arm earns in naira, but I have to report to investors in Euros,” said Osiadi. “So every dime generated there [Nigeria] has to match what I tell them. What Esca does is make sure that revenue is actually held as Euros, so if the naira drops, I’m not claiming we made €1 million when in reality it’s only half that.”
Esca also lets businesses lock in exchange rates for future payments through forward contracts, and prices those deals so that if the naira or cedi moves, customers can still convert at the previously agreed rate. The company does this by forecasting how much key currency pairs, such as the dollar against the naira, are likely to move within that period. It sets a rate wide enough to cover any swings, so any volatility is priced into what the client pays, and doesn’t result in a loss for Esca.
According to Osiadi, that makes Esca one of the few firms on the continent, outside older players like TCX, that offers this kind of hedging at scale to African corporates, including in markets where central banks do not provide forwards. The harder part, for Osiadi, is the education. Many finance executives he meets still see derivatives as complex or unfamiliar, which slows adoption even when the need is obvious.
The company also offers a non‑fixed deposit product that lets businesses earn interest on their local currency balances, such as naira, and netting up to 20% in returns, according to Osiadi.
How Esca Finance makes money
Esca Finance generates revenue from fees and FX spreads. The company charges between 0.3% and 2% on all currency trades, depending on how much a business is moving: larger tickets attract lower fees, while smaller trades attract near-2%. It also charges a $300 onboarding fee, which filters out “unserious prospects” rather than serving as a major revenue line, said Osiadi.
Stablecoins are critical to how Esca operates, though clients never see them. On major routes like naira‑dollar or naira‑euro, the company can stay entirely on fiat rails and deliver fiat to client accounts within 24 hours.
It has also built a business in what it calls “exotic” or difficult markets, such as Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Angola, where capital controls and banking frictions can make moving money hard. It accepts and remits funds in those corridors using the same mix of local partners, stablecoins, and fiat rails, a capability it presents as one of the reasons larger firms like MoneyGram, NALA, and Bridge plug into its network rather than trying to build everything themselves.
Esca takes local currency, converts it into US‑backed stablecoins to trade where liquidity is deeper, then turns the proceeds back into fiat in the target currency and credits the client’s account; for businesses, it functions like a simple treasury tool: local cash in, hard currency out.
“We are different because we focus first on economic impact, and then second on the technology that brings about positive economic impact,” Osiadi said, speaking about the choice of stablecoins powering its FX treasury solution. “We were doing it before anybody said it was cool.”
Esca relies on third‑party liquidity providers, about 70 of them according to Osiadi, to source currencies on the spot as trades on its platform are executed. This deepens its liquidity pool and reduces the need to hold large currency positions itself, but it also creates counterparty risk that the company has to manage carefully.
To reduce those risks, Esca runs tight checks on both clients and liquidity partners. Its team meets partners in person, visits their offices, reviews corporate documents in detail and, where something feels off, discreetly speaks to their existing customers or runs background checks before approving them. The goal is to be “very sure people are who they say they are” before trusting them with volume, said Osiadi.
Esca’s bid to become a global FX infrastructure
Esca Finance is a European‑based company serving African and emerging market businesses. It is headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, with operating entities in Nigeria, Ghana, and Canada. It uses Ireland and the UK as its main bases for Europe and Nigeria as its hub in Africa.
Its licences follow that footprint. Esca Finance is registered as a Money Services Business (MSB) in Canada and is working toward an Electronic Money Institution (EMI) licence in Ireland. In Nigeria, Esca says it offers its services through licenced third‑party international money transfer operators (IMTOs) and microfinance banks, rather than holding those licences directly. Osiadi said the company is also in talks with the Nigerian Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for virtual asset service provider status. It is also pursuing similar approvals in Ghana and other African markets as it builds out virtual asset operations.
Esca Finance competes with several other global FX providers in the crowded $917.9 billion market, according to US-based research firm IMARC Group, including banks, traditional FX houses, and newer fintechs such as Wise, Revolut, and Africa‑ and emerging market-focused players like Yellow Card, Fincra, and Onafriq.
The company plans to deepen its banking infrastructure and expand to more corridors, making it easy to open and operate a local account in more elusive African markets where FX is hard to source. It also plans to expand the same model into Latin American markets, such as Brazil and Mexico.
For Osiadi, the ambition is to become the FX plumbing that the most important companies in the world, large and mid-sized, rely on.
