Verto's Ola Oyetayo on why African firms still cannot pay abroad

Verto, the London-based cross-border payments platform built for businesses trading with and from Africa, launched a multi-currency corporate card with Visa in September. The card draws directly on eleven separately held currency wallets, with no FX markup on ten of them, and reaches more than 160 further currencies through Visa's own network.

Its co-founder and chief executive, Ola Oyetayo, spent his early career at American Express, Barclays and Lloyds Bank before founding Verto. He spoke to Disrupts about the problem the card is aimed at: why paying and getting paid internationally remains so much harder for an African business than for its competitors elsewhere, and what it will take to change that.

The card that stops at the border

For Oyetayo the most common failure of a single-currency corporate card is the simplest one. “The simplest failure is that the card just stops working the moment the business crosses a border, literally or digitally,” he said. A card denominated in naira, cedis or shillings converts every international transaction at the point of sale, “usually at a rate and a fee you don't see until the statement arrives.”

Nigeria is his clearest example. During the FX crisis, banks cut international limits on naira cards to as little as 20 dollars a month in 2022, and several suspended international card spend altogether. International use only returned in mid-2025, capped at around 500 dollars a month at some banks. Limits have risen sharply this year as dollar liquidity has improved, and a handful of the biggest banks now allow tens of thousands of dollars a quarter. “But what a business can spend depends entirely on which bank it's with, at a rate the bank resets daily, and the limit can change with a single customer email. One major bank has changed its limit three times this year alone. That's not something you can plan a quarter's ad spend or supplier payments around.”

The consequences are concrete. “I've seen businesses nearly lose access to Microsoft 365 because their card stopped working internationally. I've seen advertisers watch their Facebook ad spend decline mid-campaign and have to scramble for a virtual dollar card or some other workaround. The cost isn't abstract. It's a campaign that goes dark, a tool that locks you out, a supplier relationship that gets harder to manage.”

The cost you can see, and the cost you cannot

Asked how much of the cost of international payments for African SMEs sits in visible fees and how much in rejected transactions, delays and stranded working capital, Oyetayo pointed first to what is measured. The World Bank's most recent Remittance Prices Worldwide data puts Sub-Saharan Africa as the most expensive region in the world to move money internationally, at roughly 8.4 to 8.5 per cent to send 200 dollars, against a global average closer to 6.4 per cent and well above the UN's 3 per cent target. Industry estimates put FX spreads on cross-border transactions at roughly 3 to 8 per cent, plus correspondent banking fees of 15 to 50 dollars per intermediary hop, and a payment can pass through more than one hop before it lands.

“What doesn't show up in any report is the cost of what doesn't happen at all: the ad campaign that got cut off mid-flight, the subscription that lapsed because a card declined, the cash sitting in the wrong currency earning nothing while a shipment waits to clear,” he said. “I wouldn't put a precise split on it, because I don't think anyone has measured it precisely. But from running this business, I'd say the fee you can see on a statement is often the smaller half of the real cost.”

Why the banks have not fixed it

Oyetayo does not see the gap as an oversight. “Part of it is a deliberate retreat, not an oversight,” he said. Global banks have been pulling back correspondent banking relationships across Africa for more than a decade, because the compliance and anti-money-laundering cost of maintaining those relationships stopped looking worth it against the revenue the corridors generate. “That's a business decision, made account by account, and African SMEs are usually on the losing side of it.”

The other part is cost structure. He cited McKinsey research showing cost-to-asset ratios at African banks roughly double the global average, with 60 to 70 per cent of that cost still coming from manual, legacy processes. Building multi-currency card infrastructure for SMEs is expensive and operationally demanding, and a bank whose cost base is already strained will serve its largest clients first. “Smaller, internationally-trading businesses get left with whatever's left over, which in many cases is a card that only works at home.”

What Verto had to build

Three things had to come together for the card. The first was a scheme relationship: Verto issues the card under its own FCA authorisation as an electronic money institution, pursuant to a licence from Visa Europe, which Oyetayo described as “the regulatory and scheme foundation the rest of the product sits on.”

The second was wallet infrastructure, so the card can draw directly from eleven separately held currency wallets, including naira, US dollars, euros, yen, sterling, Swiss francs and the Canadian, Australian and New Zealand dollars, along with the Norwegian and Swedish krona, “without someone manually converting funds before they spend, and with zero FX markup on ten of those. That's the part that's invisible to the end user.” The third was the handoff: for currencies Verto does not hold, it leans on Visa's network and conversion rails to reach more than 160 further currencies. “We didn't need to replicate that reach ourselves. The job was making the eleven we do hold work without friction, and making the handoff to Visa's network clean for everything else.”

Who is using it first

The clearest adopters are businesses that trade across borders as a core part of what they do: importers and exporters paying suppliers in one currency and collecting revenue in another, often several times a week. Close behind are technology and digital-services companies and professional-services firms running ad accounts, SaaS subscriptions and operational expenses across several currencies at once. “For both groups, the card isn't a convenience; it's how they keep the business running day to day.”

A third group he is watching rather than counting is African remote and digital workers increasingly paid in two or more currencies. “The demand there looks real, but I'd treat it as emerging rather than something we have hard adoption numbers against yet.”

What has to change next

Correspondent banks are still withdrawing from African corridors, regulatory and FX-control regimes differ from country to country, and most African banks and fintechs still operate as sponsored participants under someone else's scheme membership, “which adds cost and a layer of dependency that shows up in what the end customer pays.”

Oyetayo's prescription is more direct infrastructure and direct scheme relationships for African banks and fintechs, the continued build-out of pan-African settlement rails, with PAPSS, now live across 19 countries and designed to let African currencies settle with each other without routing through the dollar, as the clearest example, and global card networks and local regulators extending direct partnerships into the continent “as a core market, not an afterthought bolted on later.”

“None of that happens overnight,” he said. “But it's the direction things have to move for African businesses to operate internationally on the same terms as everyone else.”