As Africa lags in intra-continental trade, one startup is using fintech to bypass currency volatility and regulatory hurdles – and just won a $1m prize for its local currency-friendly platform.
Despite its potential for boosting growth and development, pan-African integration lags the rest of the world, with intra-continental commerce accounting for just around 15% of Africa’s global trade. The winner of this year’s $1m Milken-Motsepe Prize in FinTech aims to change that with technology that enables small African companies to move money seamlessly across fragmented regulatory environments.
Verto is a business-to-business, cross-border payments platform that enables businesses in emerging markets to send and receive money. It eliminates intermediary fees, supports dozens of currencies and settles transactions quickly.
“One of the biggest barriers to effective trade on the continent is that many African currencies are very illiquid and considered exotic,” Verto CEO and co-founder Ola Oyetayo tells The Africa Report. “There’s also extreme volatility. So you have a situation where most people trust the greenback, the US dollar, rather than their local currency,” he adds.
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