Grey targets dollar-free payments for African businesses

Grey, the Y Combinator-backed cross-border payments company, says it has built direct currency conversion routes to help African businesses pay suppliers across borders without first converting their money into US dollars, as it expands its services for businesses trading across the continent.

Speaking at a media briefing with journalists on the sidelines of Moonshot by TechCabal 2026 in Lagos, Nigeria, on Thursday, Idorenyin Obong, Grey’s co-founder and chief executive officer, identified payment reliability and foreign exchange (FX) liquidity as two major challenges businesses face when making international transactions.

Payments between African countries can involve multiple currency conversions. For instance, a Nigerian business paying a supplier in Kenya may need to convert naira into US dollars before exchanging it for Kenyan shillings, adding another step to an already complicated transaction.

“Most times, if you’re trading within Africa, there’s always some form of intermediary currency,” Obong said. “We’ve built out these currency pairs, these exotic currency pairs, such that you never have to go in between to the USD.”

Obong said Grey has invested in payment infrastructure that allows customers in Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana to collect and send money, supported by liquidity arrangements across multiple currencies.

The company said the infrastructure enables real-time settlement in several supported currencies, reducing the need for businesses to source FX through multiple intermediaries.

The problem extends beyond Grey’s customers. In October, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the global bank for central banks, said that many payments between African countries still pass through correspondent banking networks outside the continent, increasing costs and exposing businesses to operational risks.

Other payment providers are also trying to address the problem. The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), developed by Afreximbank in partnership with African institutions, has been expanding local currency payment infrastructure.

In February, it partnered with Kenya’s Pesalink network to connect regional payments with Kenyan banks and mobile money providers.

Reducing currency conversion steps is only one part of the problem for Grey. Businesses also need assurance that payments will reach suppliers within an expected timeframe, particularly when delays can disrupt procurement and trading relationships.

Obong said customers moving amounts as little as $50, and larger amounts reaching $1 million, can experience uncertainty over whether funds will reach their destination when needed. To address this, Grey provides estimated payment delivery times and says it has invested in infrastructure to improve the reliability of its international payouts.

“We spent the last six years building the infrastructure to ensure that we’re delivering at the last mile at 99.99% to our customers,” Obong said.

In February, Grey expanded into payments and settlement for businesses, as its consumer transaction volumes grew. During the briefing, Obong disclosed that the company had processed more than 40 million transactions and nearly $5 billion in payments since inception.

Grey Business, its multi-currency platform for startups and small businesses, has processed nearly $100 million since launching in February, according to the company. By June, the company said that the platform had processed $61.4 million in its first four months, partly driven by demand for stablecoin-based payments.

The company has also expanded payouts to China, allowing businesses to pay overseas suppliers in Chinese yuan.

Beyond business payments, Grey is trying to solve another problem: what happens after individuals receive money from abroad.

Obong said the company initially launched in 2020 as a currency exchange service but expanded into foreign currency accounts after discovering that customers struggled to receive international payments in the first place.

Remote work accelerated demand for those services, especially among professionals earning foreign currencies while living in African markets.

“Most of our customers were using Grey to receive their foreign salary. And so we decided to build what I would call simply a salary account for these customers,” he said.

That insight led the company to build Paycheck, the salary product Grey launched on Wednesday. The service allows professionals earning in dollars, pounds, and euros to receive and manage their salaries, with features designed to separate money intended for spending and saving.

Obong said Paycheck also integrates with Pouch, Grey’s savings feature, which allows customers to set aside money for goals such as education, travel, or major purchases. The company is exploring additional benefits, including credit and lifestyle rewards.

The push reflects Grey’s ambition to build services around customers’ financial activities rather than simply helping them receive or transfer money.

Grey also faced questions at the briefing about difficulties some customers encounter when accessing foreign currency accounts and obtaining support.

The company said it offers round-the-clock digital assistance and has a physical office, although it considers online support more effective for routing customer issues to its distributed teams.

Grey’s next challenge is proving that its expanding range of services can solve these problems consistently.

Banks must anticipate customers’ needs and embed financial services into everyday transactions to compete with digital platforms, executives from Access Holdings and OPay told Moonshot by TechCabal in Lagos.

Daniel Awe, head of Fintech Foundry at Access Holdings, said banking’s next phase would require institutions to offer services when customers needed them, rather than wait for people to visit a branch or open an application.

“The future of banks is going to be in everyday people, where banks become invisible,” he said during a panel titled “The Next Bank: Competing in the Age of Programmable Money”.

His argument extends the shift from branch banking to mobile services. Moving a transaction onto a phone changes how customers access a bank; integrating finance into activities such as paying school fees or replenishing stock changes when they encounter it.

“When the customer is engaging you, it’s not the future of banking. It’s the banks that now have to place themselves in the life of the customer,” Awe said.

Chukwudinma Okafor, chief compliance officer at OPay Nigeria, said the starting point should be customers’ practical needs, rather than the availability of new technology.

“For us at OPay, the major focus is just to address one thing, and that’s customers. You have to meet the customers where they need you,” he said.

OPay sent developers, technology professionals and sales teams to markets across Nigeria to observe how traders worked and gather feedback, Okafor said. Requests for different sounds to signal successful and failed point-of-sale transactions illustrated how small changes could make a service more useful.

The example highlighted a distinction in the discussion: anticipating customers’ needs can involve sophisticated infrastructure, but the improvement customers value may be straightforward.

Modernising the systems

Awe said traditional banks would also need to overhaul the infrastructure supporting their products. Conventional core banking systems alone were insufficient for competing with fintechs and technology companies offering financial services.

That transition would have to be gradual, preserving reliability and compliance while addressing the risks created by increasingly interconnected systems.

“Whatever you want to achieve, you have to put security in the middle,” he said.

Okafor said digital-first companies had benefited from starting with more modern infrastructure, including cloud-based systems, while established banks were increasingly adopting similar technologies.

Despite their competition for customers, both speakers argued that banks and fintechs remained dependent on one another.

Awe said partnerships combined banks’ financial capabilities with fintechs’ ability to serve particular customer groups. Some businesses required approaches that companies such as OPay could provide more readily, he added.

Okafor pointed to fintechs’ reliance on commercial banks for settlement and the handling of customer funds. Cooperation was also necessary to respond to fraud when money moved between institutions.

“Ultimately, we need each other for the ecosystem to work well,” he said.

The discussion also turned to Nigeria’s approach to cryptocurrency and stablecoins, with Awe describing differing priorities among regulators.

He said the Securities and Exchange Commission had shown greater appetite for cryptocurrency-related activities, while the Central Bank of Nigeria had been more cautious because of monetary policy and consumer protection concerns.

According to Awe, the central bank was examining stablecoin use cases through a regulatory sandbox, allowing approved participants to test services under supervision.

He characterised stablecoins as less volatile than other cryptocurrencies. That distinction was his assessment of their appeal to the regulator, rather than a guarantee of their stability.

For banks weighing new technologies, the broader challenge identified by the panel was to make services easier to access while maintaining the security and reliability customers expected. Becoming less visible in a transaction would require substantial work on the systems behind it.

Grey, the Y Combinator-backed cross-border payments company, is looking to use foreign currency salary records to help remote workers access credit, addressing a gap in how traditional lenders assess professionals earning internationally.

Speaking on the Moonshot Podcast at Moonshot by TechCabal 2026 in Lagos, Nigeria, Idorenyin Obong, Grey’s co-founder and chief executive officer, said many remote workers struggle to establish creditworthiness because conventional credit bureaus have limited visibility into income earned from foreign employers.

He said Grey plans to use income and transaction data accumulated over the past six years to develop credit services for these customers.

“This is built on our own data and income intelligence from the last five to six years,” Obong said.

The planned offering forms part of Grey’s expansion into salary management following the launch of Paycheck on Wednesday.

The product allows professionals earning in US dollars, British pounds, and euros to automatically divide their salaries between spending, savings, and emergency funds.

With Paycheck, Obong said that a customer receiving $1,000 monthly could choose to allocate 20% to savings, another 10% to other financial needs, and retain 70% for immediate expenses. Users can adjust these allocations rather than follow a fixed spending formula.

Eligible Paycheck customers can also earn up to 3% annual interest on their US dollar Pouch, Grey’s savings feature. The product includes an emergency fund designed to help users work towards saving three months’ salary over a year, alongside salary tracking and other account benefits.

“We need to build a bit more around the lifestyle of salary customers; if a customer wants to save, we can help them with that, and then offer them interest. If a customer wants to travel, we can help them with that,” Obong said, adding that Grey is looking to support flight bookings and provide eSIMs for customers travelling internationally.

“That was where the thinking came from. We still saw a gap here because I think there’s a lot of innovation we could still build for our customers; we saw that gap and decided to start with it.”

Grey’s move underscores the changing needs of remote workers who initially used cross-border fintech platforms primarily to receive foreign payments.

As international employment becomes more established, these customers increasingly need tools to manage their earnings, build savings, and potentially access loans.

However, Grey has not announced when the credit feature will become available or disclosed its proposed lending rates and borrowing limits.

For now, Paycheck is starting with customers earning at least $300 in foreign-currency salaries.

While salary management and savings benefits are already available, Grey’s planned credit offering could extend those services to remote workers whose international earnings are often overlooked by traditional lenders.