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.
The accidental pivot
Accrue did not begin as a payments company. When the co-founders Zino Asamaige, Adesuwa Omoruyi, and Mbah started building in 2022, the focus was on helping beginners invest in crypto and stocks without getting overwhelmed. The trio left Helicarrier, the Nigerian crypto infrastructure platform that housed BuyCoins, to solve this unaddressed problem of payments fragmentation.
Their first product was a dollar-cost averaging investment tool designed to help beginners invest. The first version of Accrue’s app allowed users to buy crypto with as little as $5 daily, easing the pressure on retail investors who struggled to time the market.
While they were promoting their investment tool, a small in-app feature quietly began to take off: a stablecoin on- and off-ramp, that allowed users to convert cash to stablecoins and back. This product grew from accounting for just 4% of Accrue’s revenue to around 60% in seven months. Mbah’s friend, who was often stranded relying on Ghanaian banks, deposited her Ghanaian cedis with an Accrue agent, received stablecoins, and then sent the payment through another agent in Nigeria. It worked.
That was the moment the team realised that the real problem was moving value across African borders instantly in a reliable manner. In late 2022, the startup pivoted to focus on the agent network feature to help people make payments across borders.
“In Ghana, mobile money is king; in Nigeria, it’s bank transfers. In South Africa, it’s banks and card payments.”
“Like M-PESA on stablecoin rails”
The solution that emerged from their pivot is Cashramp, Accrue’s flagship product today. CashRamp is a stablecoin agent network spread across 11 African countries. It works much like traditional mobile money (MoMo): in Ghana, users walk up to these stablecoin agents, who serve as physical touchpoints for digital currencies, hand over their stablecoins, and receive cash in their wallets. When that money needs to cross a border, say between Ghana and Nigeria, a Ghanaian user sends money to an agent in local currency and receives the stablecoin equivalent at the prevailing market rate. Another agent in the recipient’s country (Nigeria) converts it to naira and deposits it into their bank account. The user never sees the complexity of cryptocurrency.
“What we did was train these agents and give them the ability to convert cash to stablecoins. Once people have stablecoins, they have borderless money,” said Mbah.
Cashramp’s rise coincides with the growing recognition of stablecoins as a faster and more cost-effective alternative to existing cross-border money transfer systems. Recently, Flutterwave, a Nigerian traditional fintech company, partnered with Polygon Labs, a blockchain software company, to pilot stablecoin settlement for its clients. The head-first dive into stablecoins by financial players is a signal that they expect stablecoins to play a core role in how merchants move money across Africa.
At the same time, Visa and Western Union have begun testing stablecoin processing in cross-border corridors outside the continent. Accrue is building the human-powered ramps that connect this new global system to everyday Africans through local agents.
Navigating the broken landscape
The first challenge the team faced in building Cashramp was understanding. When the team began, stablecoins were not widely recognised outside crypto circles. And even after stablecoins became more visible, the harder work was convincing people that they could be useful in everyday transactions as a way to preserve value and move money across borders without friction.
And then there’s the gargantuan challenge of regulation. Until recently, the relationship between African governments and cryptocurrencies remained notoriously tense. Omoruyi described the difficulty of trying to convince governments that they are not trying to devalue their currencies.
In expanding across African markets, the team quickly learned that Africa is not one market. Asamaige emphasised that every market is different and learnings from one country are not always transferable. He noted that coming from Nigeria, a country spoiled for choice with fintechs, and moving into underserved markets in Francophone West Africa was a learning experience, as they discovered a huge demand for financial technology that Nigerians might take for granted.
Despite these challenges, Accrue said the pivot from a crypto investment app to an agent-led stablecoin platform is paying off. In February, the startup raised $1.58 million in seed funding, which has ignited their expansion push from seven to eleven markets. The funding also supports the company’s push into Francophone West Africa.
The human-powered differentiator
This human-centred approach is what sets Accrue apart from traditional remittance players. “We have built a model that people are familiar with. With traditional stablecoin on/off ramps, it’s usually an algorithm that runs the process. We’re pioneering a unique model where you interact with a human,” Asamaige says.
He explains that users are already familiar with the mobile money agent model, which makes them more comfortable trusting a Cashramp agent, especially after their first successful payment. This familiarity matters because the majority of Africans who move money across borders are not crypto-native. They prioritise trust in relationships before relying on technology.
Cashramp’s peer-to-peer nature is cheaper and more reliable as it moves money with fewer intermediaries by avoiding the layers of payment processors and FX spreads that usually inflate cross-border fees. In markets like Ghana, traditional collections done through payment service providers (PSPs) usually incur two layers of cost, including the MoMo transfer fee, typically 1%, and then an additional PSP collection fee of up to 2%.
With Cashramp, the customer transfers directly to a verified agent’s MoMo account, making it a peer-to-peer transaction rather than one routed through PSP infrastructure, bypassing the second fee entirely.
The agents themselves do not introduce new costs; rather, they extend an existing behaviour. Most of them were already mobile money operators or informal FX traders managing float every day. Cashramp simply overlays stablecoin liquidity on top of those familiar practices, and agents earn a 15% commission on customer withdrawals. Over 16,000 people have expressed interest in becoming agents; however, only 500 agents have been approved and verified by the company.
The co-founders describe Accrue as the settlement layer for African money. Their ambition is to make stablecoins the infrastructure behind everyday transactions and to position Accrue as the gateway where those stablecoins enter and exit the lives of ordinary people.
“It’s always been evident to us, and people are catching up to the fact that stablecoins will be how people move money before the end of the decade,” said Mbah.
