Clinton Mbah, co-founder and CEO of Accrue, recalls when the problem became impossible to ignore. In 2022, a friend in Ghana tried to send money to her aunt in Nigeria. She spent the entire day moving between banks in Accra, filling out forms, waiting in queues, and trying every transfer option available. Yet, the transaction wouldn’t go through.
This experience is a snapshot of Africa’s fragmented cross-border payment problem. As the Accrue team explains, the challenge is that every country has a different way of paying. “In Ghana, mobile money is king; in Nigeria, it’s bank transfers. In South Africa, it’s banks and card payments. All of these disparate payment methods mean that there’s no single, unified way to pay across Africa, and that is effectively what Accrue intends to solve,” said Mbah.
