Despite the rhetoric that Africa has a booming digital economy, moving money across the continent is still harder than shipping a container to Europe.
Cash transfers from Lagos to Accra, for instance, may travel through correspondent banks in New York before reaching the destination; picking up fees, delays, and currency losses along the way.
This is a monumental inefficiency that is rooted in the continent’s fragmented currencies, uneven regulations, and decades-old financial infrastructure that condemns intra-African trade to barely 15% of the continent’s commerce.
Based on these challenges, Lagos-based fintech — Fincra — built payment rails it says Africa direly needs. A cross-border network of APIs that make money flow across countries as easily as sending a text message.
The startup has positioned itself as a new-age financial infrastructure player, aiming to tackle the cost and complexity of cross-border payments. Fincra is building the connective tissue that allows businesses to send, receive and reconcile payments across markets with ease.
By combining virtual accounts in major currencies with real-time settlement tools and a data-driven approach to compliance, Fincra says it can give African merchants the kind of speed and transparency that global rivals take for granted. Its bet is that solving payments at the infrastructure level will not only unlock smoother trade across the continent but also position African businesses to compete on a global scale.
Today, businesses often rely on the U.S. dollar and euro corridors to clear transactions between African markets, a workaround that inflates costs, creates FX exposure, and limits liquidity for local businesses. Fincra has built rails that enable direct settlement in African currencies, whether between naira and shilling, cedi and rand, or franc and birr.
This involves creating infrastructure from scratch, rather than layering products over outdated systems, and working with banks, telcos, regulators and FX partners to normalize liquidity and compliance across markets.
By combining APIs with a treasury backbone that supports over 40 currencies, Fincra wants to transform today’s patchwork of WhatsApp FX trades and fragmented gateways into a standardized network that unlocks trade on the scale the African Continental Free Trade Area envisions.
Today, most payments across the continent flow through siloed systems, leaving businesses and regulators blind to patterns that could reduce fraud, extend credit, or broaden financial inclusion. Fincra’s bet is that by stitching together fragmented payment flows into a unified data layer, it can transform raw transactions into actionable insights.
That means spotting anomalies before they become fraud, giving small businesses the credit scores they’ve long lacked, and helping banks and fintechs build products on more reliable intelligence. In a region where information asymmetry often proves as costly as currency shortages, Fincra sees payments data as the next stage of Africa’s financial integration.
Fincra is carving out its niche in Africa’s crowded payments landscape by leaning on three advantages that legacy banks and a multitude of other fintechs struggle to match. First is its pan-African footprint. Rather than building in silos, the company is securing licenses and partnerships across multiple markets, giving merchants a unified network instead of fragmented local fixes.
Second is its technology-first DNA. Fincra’s API-driven infrastructure is designed to scale across borders, handling settlement, FX, and compliance in real time. And finally, instead of pushing generic products, Fincra engineers solutions around the pain points of merchants, from liquidity shortages to complex treasury management. That contrasts sharply with banks weighed down by rigid systems and fintech copycats whose ambitions rarely extend beyond one country.
Fincra’s vision is to be the backbone that allows African businesses to think and act continent-wide, connecting markets the way broadband once connected households. For Fincra, payments are not the endgame but the foundation for Africa’s development.
