Payments Certainty, Not Technology, Africa’s Biggest Fintech Gap – Verto Exec

Africa’s payments infrastructure is largely in place, but businesses still lack certainty over cost, speed and settlement, according to Mark Mwaniki, Commercial Director for East Africa at cross-border payments firm Verto.

Verto has moved more than $20 billion (approximately Sh2.6 trillion) across African borders since launching.

Speaking on the TechTrends Podcast, Mr Mwaniki said Africa’s fintech sector has matured considerably over the past decade.

He pointed to a wave of consolidation reshaping the market, with banks acquiring fintech startups and platforms expanding beyond payments into banking, lending and treasury.

“The industry right now, where we are in 2026, 10 years ago we were not where we are at this point,” he said, tracing the shift back to M-Pesa’s early expansion in Kenya.

He said fintechs are increasingly building for scale, anticipating that a business’s needs will shift over a three-to-five year horizon.

Mr Mwaniki described Africa as one of the world’s most promising markets, citing buy-now-pay-later and open banking as concepts still gaining ground on the continent.

He pushed back on the assumption that digital payments have already solved cross-border trade in Africa, arguing the technology is largely in place but confidence in transaction outcomes is not.

He said fintechs have historically assumed a product that worked in one market would automatically work in another.

Kenya illustrates the point, he said. A stable shilling limits domestic appeal for foreign exchange products, while businesses paying into the Middle East face a different problem: the absence of direct payment rails.

He distinguished between payments and treasury, describing the former as a single transaction and the latter as the strategic management of cash flow, foreign exchange and multi-currency operations.

“Anyone can wake up and do a payment,” he said. “But you can’t just wake up and open a treasury desk.”

For businesses moving money across borders, he said, the core requirement is predictability – knowing when funds will arrive, what a transaction will cost, and how much of that cost is foreign exchange fees versus transaction charges.

He illustrated the inefficiency of traditional cross-border rails with an analogy to air travel. A Kenyan business sending money directly to Nigeria does not move the way a passenger books a direct Nairobi-Lagos flight, he said.

Funds are typically converted from shillings to euros, then to US dollars, and again into naira, adding settlement delays and layers of intermediary bank charges.

Trust, he said, has been the clearest lesson from moving billions across regulated markets. Verto positions itself as a collaborator to banks rather than a competitor, since client funds are held with custodian banks rather than with Verto itself.

Regulatory engagement has been critical to Verto’s expansion across Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, the UK and the UAE, he said.

He pointed to the payment licence-passporting arrangement between Kenya and Rwanda, and a similar one between Rwanda and Ghana, as a model he hopes more African central banks will adopt.

He compared it to how a single licence allows businesses to operate across the European Union.

“I think the biggest challenge is they don’t talk,” he said of the continent’s fragmented regulatory landscape.

On Kenya’s positioning as a regional financial hub, Mr Mwaniki said local businesses increasingly recognise their addressable market extends beyond the border.

However, he said many exporters and manufacturers still don’t know how to get paid once a cross-border deal is struck, describing this as a gap in awareness rather than policy.

He said frameworks such as the African Continental Free Trade Area already provide a reasonable foundation, but public infrastructure initiatives such as the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System need to work alongside private-sector players.

He warned that adoption among micro and small businesses remains slower than policymakers had hoped.

Asked what chief financial officers should look for in a cross-border payments partner, Mr Mwaniki again pointed to predictability: clarity on foreign exchange rates, the ability to hedge, and firm settlement timelines.

“Features are nice to have,” he said, “but when you look at it deep down, what a business really wants is: did payroll go out on time to all our consultants or employees in different markets? Was our supplier paid on time?”

He said Verto differentiates through a “compliance-first” market-entry approach and a tiered strategy that prioritises mastering specific customer segments before expanding.

The firm has also invested in infrastructure that allows Kenyan businesses to hold multi-currency accounts, including a US dollar account with a US bank, without incorporating locally, he said.

On stablecoins, Mr Mwaniki said he views them as a long-term direction for the industry, pointing to Kenya’s virtual asset legislation as evidence regulators are warming to the conversation.

However, he said enterprise adoption remains limited by a lack of clear use cases. Most current activity involves fiat collection, cross-border movement via stablecoins, and fiat settlement, he said.

“I wish or I would like a future where you or I can walk into a supermarket with our stablecoins and pay with our stables,” he said. “That is where I believe we will go in the future, but only time will tell in terms of how soon.”

Verto’s focus over the next five years remains on refining its infrastructure to match the changing needs of African businesses, Mr Mwaniki said.

“Africa is the future,” he said. “So we must build for our continent.” You can watch the full episode of the podcast here. 

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