🎙 F-Squared Podcast #8 – Ola Oyetayo on Cross-Border Payments in Africa

What it really takes to move money across borders and why stablecoins aren’t a silver bullet.

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Why I Wanted to Have This Conversation

There’s been a surge of interest in cross-border payments across Africa, much of it driven by growing intra-African trade, regulatory liberalisation, and improvements in digital infrastructure. But while headlines often focus on consumer remittances or crypto-fuelled products, I wanted to understand how the infrastructure for enterprise payments is being built.

So I spoke to Ola Oyetayo, co-founder and CEO of Verto, a cross-border B2B payments platform regulated by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority and operating with multiple licences across Africa. Verto processes billions in volume each month, with clients ranging from large corporates to financial institutions. An interesting fact is that they turn away up to 95% of the potential clients and this is driven by strict compliance controls. And yet, the business scales.

This conversation unpacks the real operational challenges of building an enterprise-grade payments platform: FX liquidity, multi-currency accounts, settlement timing, corridor-level risk, regulatory exposure, and platform trust. We also touch on stablecoins, not as a product, but as an evolving backend rail. This is not a hype-driven take on cross-border innovation. It’s a grounded discussion with a licensed operator navigating the complexity in real time.

PS - We had some challenges with the video from our podcast recording platform, but we made it work. It’s a great episode, Ola is a super thoughtful leader.

In This Episode, You Will Hear

• The currency shortage in Nigeria that exposed a market gap and led Ola to build Verto;

• Why most fintechs chase growth while Verto rejects 95% of new business due to compliance risk;

• A breakdown of the core payment frictions in African markets: FX liquidity, price transparency, and settlement reliability;

• How regulatory licensing drives counterparty trust and opens enterprise corridors;

• The economics of building in illiquid or greylisted markets, and where margins still exist;

• Why Verto owns its full stack, from ledger to compliance workflows;

• Stablecoins as an internal tool for liquidity and weekend pricing, not a customer-facing product;

• Why the Francophone region and DRC represent the next major corridors for trade and payments.

Key quote: What we need to do as a cross-border payment tech company, because we don't want to be the guy with a horse and carriage where the Model T is already in business, is we want to make sure that we're able to abstract away the complexities of cross-border payments to our end user. If we have to use stablecoins in the mix, we should. It doesn't necessarily have to be something that our customers themselves adopt. Our mission is to simplify business cross-border payments for businesses in emerging markets.

🔑 Key Lessons for Fintech Builders

Technology and Infrastructure

• Liquidity is not enough, enterprise users need visibility, speed, and settlement assurance;

• Owning the infrastructure stack creates resilience and improves risk management;

• Platform reliability and client trust outweigh marginal gains from looser onboarding;

Regulation and Compliance

• FCA e-money licensing sets a high bar, but unlocks banking relationships and global trust

• Strict onboarding is not a brake, it’s a moat that signals long-term credibility

• Cybersecurity, not just compliance, is now the primary operational risk vector

Product and Commercial Strategy

• Cross-border FX is compressing, value is shifting to the quality of platform experience and API connectivity;

• Corporates don’t want to manage crypto wallets, they want stability, predictability, and service;

• Platform flexibility (multi-user controls, treasury management features) is now table stakes;

🧠 Strategic Takeaways

For Operators
Build for resilience, not just speed. A compliant, high-trust platform can scale without shortcuts. Stablecoins may help under the hood, but the client experience should be frictionless and fiat-facing particularly if you’re serving enterprise clients.

For Investors
Look beyond headline volumes. Firms that control their infrastructure, hold hard licences, and manage corridor risk with discipline are better positioned for durability and defensibility.

For Policymakers
The future of African trade depends on local convertibility and regional settlement infrastructure. Lowering friction between currencies, without routing through New York or London, should be a regulatory priority.

🧾 If You Are Interested In

• How cross-border B2B payment platforms manage corridor-level FX and compliance risk;

• Why enterprise clients value predictability more than price;

• Where the next corridors of growth are emerging beyond Nigeria and Kenya;

• How fintech infrastructure companies are integrating stablecoins quietly into the backend.

→ this episode is worth your time.

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Transcript

Samora Kariuki: Welcome to the F squared podcast where we explore the business of fintech in Africa and beyond. Today's episode features Ola Oyetayo, co-founder and CEO of Verto. We talk about how he went from group treasury at Lloyds to solving FX liquidity for African businesses, why stablecoins might become rails rather than products, and how Verto sees itself coexisting with the banks. We get into client archetypes, corridor level performance, compliance trade-offs, and what the real business model behind cross-border B2B payments looks like. Let's get into it.

Samora Kariuki: First of all, thank you so much for coming to the show. I know I pestered you on LinkedIn, so thanks for taking your time. Really looking forward to the discussion. I think your company finds itself in the middle of a huge megatrend around B2B payments and Pan-African payments. So, I'm really looking forward to the conversation. I'd want to go back to the founding story. You are a banker, a trained accountant, and you worked in treasury at both ICBC and Lloyds, and yet I read about the founding story and it came across like you stumbled across this problem of people struggling to get FX liquidity in Nigeria. Walk me back and just help me tie in that you are a treasury guy, but you still missed this problem. You didn't see it. I'd want to understand the specific bit.

Ola Oyetayo: Absolutely. First off, thanks for having me on your podcast. I think it's great to always have a medium to share stories that are relevant in the tech space. So, extremely glad that you deemed me fit to be a guest here.

With respect to the founding story, I think that now that I'm maybe seven years into running a fintech, one of the things that I've realized is that it's always much, much better if you're solving a problem as a fintech, a tech company, or a startup. Where you find yourself doing something but not really solving anyone's problem or pain points, that becomes an issue. My foray into cross-border payments was really driven off the back of needs from some of my friends. I was working in financial services in the city in London. I am a Nigerian immigrant; I came to the UK 20 years ago to study. As everyone that is a migrant knows, it's a dream to get a proper job once you graduate. So, I was lucky enough to be one of the few that got jobs in the city, and I think I had a decent 10-year career there. But, I always had this urge to do something entrepreneurial, given that I don't know if it's the Nigerian in me, because I think when there's 220 million of you, everyone always tries to do something, and I realize a lot of us are just small business entrepreneurs and micro-small businesses; everyone has some gig that they're doing.

Even though I had this formal corporate job, I was always up to something. There was a time, around 2016, when there was a significant currency liquidity crisis in Nigeria. The Naira had just got slightly devalued, and there wasn't enough hard currency liquidity to go around. I had some very successful friends that had built very good local businesses that needed to make payments to their suppliers abroad, and most of them were stuck with a lot of Nigerian Naira but had no means for being able to convert it into hard currency such as US dollars to make payments. At that time, there was almost like a central bank queue.

You'd have to apply for foreign currency through your banks, and your bank gets on this queue, and there was just no one getting any allocations, if you can put it that way, from the central bank because the reserves were lower, and there wasn't enough to go around. Obviously, the larger indigenous conglomerates or tycoons got their allocation, but if you're a small business trying to get a million or $100,000 out, it was super hard.

There was a recurring pattern of my friends reaching out and saying, "Hey, Ola, I need to make a payment to these guys in the US, $100,000. I'm just trying to get liquidity from anyone. Do you know how I can get anyone to help me out?" And then I thought, "Okay, well, this has to be something that's a big problem." I looked into it, and then I started helping out by sourcing friends here in the UK and also in the US that needed to do things in Nigeria and needed local currency. At the time, because of the currency devaluation, a lot of people were investing in property because if you're a US-based surgeon earning a lot of money, it was just the right time to maybe buy a place in Nigeria worth $50,000 or whatever. So, the idea came from people solving my friends' needs with liquidity from other friends that I knew. I did that for a few months, and then Anthony, my co-founder, and I used to meet regularly to play poker. We had a bunch of friends, and we're still very good friends to date.

I had a regular poker session, I think every two weeks or every month. So, at one of those sessions, I was just telling him about how I was making a decent living outside of my formal job, helping to broker Nigerian trades or something. And then he said, "Oh, this is super weird. Why don't you just create a tech marketplace? A currency exchange marketplace where everything is done online, and you can match supply and demand, and everything is done through technology, and you don't have to be the one on your phone trying to do this." That's how the concept of Verto started, and Verto actually means swap in Latin.

So, the actual first iteration of the product was a peer-to-peer currency exchange marketplace for individuals and businesses to exchange hard-to-get currencies for more liquid ones. That's the actual origin story. We thought, "If we're going to do this, then let's just take it super seriously." So, we both quit our jobs and committed to actually building the product and the business. We bootstrapped for a few months. We got lucky, got into Y Combinator, did YC, and then raised money, and we've been off to the races since then.

Samora Kariuki: Very interesting story. The reason why people reached out is because they figured that you may have a way of knowing how to solve this problem, given that you work in the city and that background.

Ola Oyetayo: 100%.

Samora Kariuki: Spot on. So, it was this guy that works in treasury in the city, and that was pretty much the common theme. Got it. But Verto now is way more than just swaps and currency swaps. It's a much more comprehensive product. I was reading something you wrote on CIO Africa some time back, and you broke down the problem really well. You said that with FX and payments in Africa, there are three friction points: the first one is liquidity, the second one is price discovery, and the last one is settlement. To make it more tangible for the audience, using that Nigerian example, someone is buying $5 million worth of equipment. The first problem is finding $5 million. That's the liquidity problem. Once that is solved, the second problem, price discovery, is how do I know which is the best rate, how do I know the pricing? And then the last one is that now I have the $5 million, I've gotten them at a good price, but I actually need to make the payment to Shanghai. That's the settlement problem. How do you move from a currency swap to a business that's solving that comprehensive problem? Maybe you can walk us through from both a technology and a licensing perspective the core things you need to build to be able to provide that service comprehensively.