Maplerad founder and CEO Obinna Chukwujioke said in a Nairametrics interview that fragmented cross-border payments had slowed Africa’s digital economy, and he argued that interoperability would determine whether the region’s digital commerce ambitions succeeded.
FRAGMENTATION AND ITS EFFECTS
Chukwujioke spoke to Nairametrics about the practical barriers that had constrained cross-border flows across African markets. He said cross-border rails were still "incredibly fragmented", and that the most urgent gap was local currency liquidity, clearing and settlement across regions.
He said that until regulatory standards were harmonised and multicurrency settlement rails adopted, macro initiatives such as the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) would struggle.
He said moving money between neighbouring African countries too often required routing through the dollar or stablecoins, which was inefficient and expensive, and that settlement should take hours rather than weeks.
IMPLICATIONS FOR FINTECHS, BANKS AND REGULATORS
Chukwujioke addressed what the issues meant for fintechs and banks operating in Africa. He described traditional banks as the foundational ledger layer, saying banks had the balance sheets, regulatory longevity and trust while fintechs had the agility, product design depth and distribution speed. He called interoperability "the entire game", saying that without it "you do not have an ecosystem; you just have a collection of digital islands".
On funding, he said "the era of optimizing for top line transaction volume at all costs is over" and that the metric that now mattered was unit economics and the path to profitability.
He said increased regulatory engagement could feel restrictive at first but brought much-needed legitimacy and stability, and argued for treating compliance as a competitive advantage by building KYC, AML and monitoring into product architecture.
He described the relationship between banks and fintechs as a "deeply symbiotic partnership" based on co-opetition and deep integration.
As an example, he said a merchant using a fintech wallet in Nairobi should be able to instantly pay a supplier using a traditional bank account in Lagos, with the regulator having real-time visibility into the compliance data.
Maplerad, formerly Wirepay, has moved from a consumer payments app to a banking-as-a-service provider and has processed more than $500 million in transactions across African markets, according to Nairametrics.
Sources: Nairametrics Finance