Africa’s trading relationships are changing. Businesses are increasingly forging direct connections with suppliers in China, India and other Asian markets, bypassing the Western intermediaries that once dominated global trade. But while trade has found new routes, the banking infrastructure needed to support it has struggled to keep up.
Scott Liddle, co-founder of cross-border payments company Capi Money, saw this shift first-hand in Guangzhou, where traders from Cameroon and Mali have established communities connecting Chinese manufacturers with African importers.
“They are the glue,” he says. “They are the bridge between the importers back home and the Chinese exporters.” The relationships are flourishing, but getting money across borders remains a stubborn obstacle — one that can undermine trust between businesses even when neither party is at fault.
When a late payment tells the wrong story
Cross-border payment delays can damage relationships between African importers and their suppliers, even when the businesses themselves have done nothing wrong. A missed deadline might suggest financial trouble or poor management, but the real problem often lies with the banking system.
“There’s not enough foreign currency in the system at that particular month end,” Liddle explains. “Their bank can’t get them the foreign currency they need to pay that invoice.”
Unexpected compliance requirements can also hold up transfers. Liddle describes the banking arrangements connecting these businesses as “old and creaky,” with companies still dependent on systems that struggle to support modern international trade.
The consequences go beyond late invoices. Suppliers may lose confidence in otherwise reliable customers, threatening relationships that took years to establish.
“You see this trust kind of collapses. But it’s no one’s fault,” Liddle says. “If there was just a well functioning system, the trust would remain there.”
A second revolution in business banking
Africa’s mobile money revolution transformed domestic payments, but international business transactions remain heavily dependent on traditional banks. Now fintech companies are trying to close that gap.
Before co-founding Capi Money in 2023, Liddle held senior commercial roles at Taptap Send, a remittance provider, and worked on humanitarian and development projects in emerging markets. He sees parallels between today’s cross-border payment problems and the barriers that once excluded millions of Africans from conventional banking.
Kenya’s M-Pesa helped change that by allowing people to transfer money using mobile phones without traditional bank accounts.
“It enabled a whole generation of people to basically skip banking,” Liddle recalls. “We think there’s going to be a second revolution there coming.”
Regulators are beginning to clear the way. In 2024, the West African Economic and Monetary Union introduced a new payment institution licensing framework, opening the market to fintech firms that previously had to work through banks or navigate regulatory grey areas.
“That’s a big step forward in terms of just modernising the framework and allowing there to be competition,” Liddle says.
The region also launched an interoperable instant-payment platform, PI-SPI, in September 2025. But progress remains uneven. Some conventional domestic transfers still take two to three days, according to Liddle.
The contrast with established markets is striking. In the UK, Faster Payments allows businesses and consumers to move money quickly and cheaply. Yet even Europe faces barriers to financial integration, including IBAN discrimination, which can prevent businesses from using accounts based in other EU countries.
For African fintechs, the challenge is particularly acute. At the time of the October 2026 interview, Capi was seeking approval under the new West African framework, having already secured a separate intermediary authorisation in Côte d’Ivoire through a banking partnership.
Regulatory progress, Liddle cautions, is “definitely not always on a VC-backed timeline”.
Beyond cross-border payments
Liddle, who is based in France, starts most days checking the company’s dashboards to see “which markets are cranking” and “which ones need a little bit of attention.” Capi focuses on Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Ghana and Nigeria, having entered the Nigerian market in early October. It started with cross-border transfers and foreign exchange for businesses, but Liddle has wider ambitions for 2027.
“We’re going to move from that to being multi-product,” he says. Plans include corporate cards denominated in foreign currencies, foreign bank accounts with unique IBANs and other services. Capi is also considering Egypt and parts of South Asia.
“The problem we address exists across a lot of emerging markets,” he says. The African trading communities he met in China suggest how far commercial relationships can develop without established Western intermediaries.
“It’s a real window into a different set of geopolitical connections that maybe we don’t hear about every day,” Liddle says.
Trade has already found new routes. Europe can no longer assume they will pass through it.
Africa’s trading relationships are changing. Businesses are increasingly forging direct connections with suppliers in China, India and other Asian markets, bypassing the Western intermediaries that once dominated global trade. But while trade has found new routes, the banking infrastructure needed to support it has struggled to keep up.
Scott Liddle, co-founder of cross-border payments company Capi Money, saw this shift first-hand in Guangzhou, where traders from Cameroon and Mali have established communities connecting Chinese manufacturers with African importers.
“They are the glue,” he says. “They are the bridge between the importers back home and the Chinese exporters.” The relationships are flourishing, but getting money across borders remains a stubborn obstacle — one that can undermine trust between businesses even when neither party is at fault.
