Verto and Visa launch multi-currency card targeting African firms
Verto, the London-based B2B payments platform, has launched a corporate card in partnership with Visa designed to remove the structural barriers that have long prevented African businesses from operating competitively in global markets. The Verto Card links directly to Verto's multi-currency wallets, enabling businesses to spend across 11 major currencies with zero FX markups on eligible transactions and indirect access to a further 160 currencies, all accepted at 150 million merchants worldwide.
The product targets a well-documented pain point. African SMEs, importers, SaaS companies and digital media buyers have historically been forced into corporate cards tied to a single settlement currency, generating hidden conversion costs, rejected transactions and leakage at the point of checkout. By routing through Visa's commercial payment rails rather than prepaid infrastructure, the card promises meaningfully higher acceptance rates and removes the manual wallet-to-wallet fund movements that add friction and delay to cross-border operations.
"African businesses have been underserved by the card products that exist today," said Ola Oyetayo, CEO and co-founder of Verto. "They are either locked into a single currency, hit by undisclosed fees, or declined at checkout because their card runs on prepaid rails."
FX access as infrastructure
The supported currency set covers USD, EUR, GBP, JPY, CHF, CAD, AUD, NZD, NOK and SEK: the ten most traded settlement currencies in global commerce. For African businesses importing goods, paying SaaS subscriptions or buying programmatic media inventory priced in dollars or euros, direct wallet-linked access without a conversion penalty amounts to a structural cost reduction, not merely a convenience feature. Verto says it facilitates over $25 billion in annual payments for more than 10,000 businesses, giving the card launch a sizeable installed base from day one.
Security is embedded at the card level: all transactions run through 3D Secure verification via one-time passcode or in-app confirmation, and businesses can apply granular spending controls by date, time and merchant category, a feature set more commonly associated with enterprise expense platforms than emerging-market payment tools.
The convergence angle: cards-as-a-service and the embedded finance layer
The more strategically significant element of the announcement may be what comes next. Verto has signalled plans to extend the platform through Google Pay mobile wallet integration and, critically, a Cards-as-a-Service (CaaS) offering via its Atlas infrastructure. Under that model, fintechs and banks would be able to embed card issuance directly into their own products through a white-label arrangement, underwritten by Verto's regulatory licensing and Visa's global network.
That pivot positions Verto not merely as a payments operator but as an infrastructure layer for African and emerging-market financial institutions that want to offer competitive cross-border card products without building the rails themselves. The dynamic mirrors a broader trend visible across the embedded finance landscape: the separation of card issuance, FX management and network access into modular, API-distributed components. Competitors in adjacent geographies, including Nium, Airwallex and Payhawk, have pursued similar composable models in Europe and Asia-Pacific, and the African market remains comparatively underpenetrated.
For macro investors watching capital flows into African fintech, the Visa partnership provides distribution credibility that historically has been the missing ingredient for challenger payment platforms seeking institutional and enterprise clients on the continent. It also signals that Visa is prepared to use its commercial rails as an active enabler of emerging-market financial inclusion, not simply as passive infrastructure, a positioning that has implications for how incumbent correspondent banks price their own African cross-border offerings.