Africa's cross-border payments market hit $329 billion in 2025 — and a Nairobi-born fintech wants stablecoins to claim a growing share of it. Accrue, the agent-led stablecoin startup operating across multiple African markets, has launched Accrue Business, a banking platform built specifically for small and medium-sized enterprises that need to send, receive, and manage money across borders without the cost and delays of traditional banking rails.
The platform is built on the same infrastructure powering Cashramp, Accrue's consumer remittance product. Businesses can now access stablecoin wallets, virtual US dollar and euro accounts, invoicing tools, virtual cards, and stablecoin-based payroll — all from a single dashboard. That means a business in Accra can receive a payment from a client in London, pay a supplier in Lagos, and run payroll directly into employees' on-chain wallets without switching between multiple services.
Why Businesses Started Asking
According to Clinton Mbah, co-founder and chief executive officer of Accrue, the business product was a direct response to demand already emerging from the company's consumer user base.
"We have seen a lot of success with individuals who have not had a reliable, affordable, and fast mobile money way for them to send money across Africa. Businesses started asking for the same thing." — Clinton Mbah, CEO, Accrue
Mbah told TechCabal that the startup retains roughly 85% of processed margins, with the remaining 15% going to the peer-to-peer agents who handle local liquidity on each side of a transaction. That agent-first model is central to how Accrue differentiates itself from rivals in an increasingly crowded space.
Agents Do the Heavy Lifting
What makes Accrue's approach distinct is that it does not hold counterparty liquidity itself. Instead, it leans on a network of agents already operating across 15 African countries to provide local currency on both ends of a transaction, with stablecoins acting as the settlement layer in between.
Mbah illustrated the mechanics plainly: a user in Ghana wanting to send money to Nigeria is matched with a Ghanaian agent who converts their Cedis into stablecoins. On the Nigerian end, a local agent settles Naira to the recipient in exchange for those same stablecoins. No bank. No payment processor sitting in the middle.
That structure lets Accrue charge businesses around 1% per transaction, with US dollar payments priced at roughly 0.5% or above depending on volume. By removing traditional intermediaries, Mbah said, Accrue can keep fees on its Cashramp consumer product capped at competitive levels too. This kind of infrastructure-first thinking is becoming a defining characteristic of the newer generation of African fintechs.
Joining a Crowded Stablecoin Race
Accrue is not alone in chasing this opportunity. Grey, Flutterwave, and Raenest all offer stablecoin-powered payment products that let businesses collect international payments, hold dollar balances, and pay across markets. The difference, at least by Accrue's reckoning, is that those platforms do not have an embedded agent liquidity network underneath them.
The timing is sharp. A report by venture capital firm Oui Capital estimates Africa's cross-border payments market could grow from $329 billion in 2025 to $1 trillion by 2035. That projection is pulling fintech investment and product launches toward cross-border infrastructure at pace, and stablecoins are increasingly the preferred settlement rail — partly because they sidestep the volatility and slow settlement windows of correspondent banking. For African businesses navigating financial risks tied to currency exposure, that is a meaningful practical advantage.
Accrue has not disclosed the number of businesses already onboarded to the new product or any transaction volume targets. But with an agent network spanning 15 countries already operational through Cashramp, the startup is not starting from scratch — it is extending an existing rails system into a new market segment with arguably higher transaction volumes and more predictable payment flows than individual remittances.
The business product is live now, though Accrue has not announced which specific African markets will have full access at launch.