Welcome to our How Money Moves series!

In our debut episode, my co-host Matthew Goldman and I explored the complexities and innovations of the payments landscape in Africa with guests Kiaan Pillay from Stitch and Yele Oyekola from Duplo.

The conversation highlighted the diverse and rapidly evolving nature of payments across the continent, contrasting the often monolithic perception of African payments. Both of our esteemed guests emphasized that while M-PESA in Kenya is a well-known success story, other regions have distinct and varied payment methods. For instance, Nigeria has seen significant progress with its real-time payments rail, NIP, enabling swift and secure bank transfers. Similarly, South Africa is evolving with new real-time payments systems, though it still faces challenges in seamless bank-to-bank transfers.

The discussion also delved into the misconceptions and drivers of innovation in African payments, the rise of fraud detection systems, and the potential for future developments like cross-border and intra-Africa payment improvements.

The conversation underscored the dynamic nature of the African payments ecosystem and the exciting innovations on the horizon that aim to address its unique challenges and opportunities.

Lastly, thanks to Zero Hash for sponsoring this episode! Zero Hash supports 50+ global platforms and has compliantly onboarded close to 5 million people to crypto and stablecoins, and their platform has processed ~$20bn+ in transaction volume. If you want to design new and better mechanisms of payments and the transfer of value across brokerage, remittance, cross-border payments, payroll and commerce, go to Zerohash.com.

‎This Week in Fintech’s Podcast: 🎧How Money Moves: Global Payments with Kiaan Pillay and Yele Oyekola on Apple Podcasts

‎Show This Week in Fintech’s Podcast, Ep 🎧How Money Moves: Global Payments with Kiaan Pillay and Yele Oyekola - Jul 22, 2024

Apple Podcasts

Transcript:

Julie: [00:00:00] Hey, everyone. I'm Julie VerHage Greenberg. 

Matthew: And I'm Matthew Goldman. 

Julie: We are your hosts for the This Week in FinTech payments podcast series. 

Matthew: In these five episodes, we'll cover everything from global payments, the B2B payments, to how our interviewees pay their plumbers and friends at dinner.

Julie: Some of our esteemed guests include Wade Arnold from Moov, Kiaan Pillay from Stitch, and Sophia Goldberg from Ansa. 

Matthew: We hope you enjoy the series and don't forget to rate and follow us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Julie: Matt, so we're kicking it off with what might be, it's definitely my top two of the episodes that we record. They're all so unique and stuff, but these two guests were so fun, and I don't know anything about how payments work in Africa. So I felt like I learned so much in this episode with Yele from Diplo and Kian from Stitch, who are both payments companies that focus a lot on Africa, but also do global payments as well.

Matthew: I love [00:02:00] learning that Africa is not just M PESA, as everyone thinks, and that, in fact, bank to bank payments can be worse in some countries, worse than it is in the United States, harder to do. So that made me feel a little bit better about ourselves, but it was super cool to learn about all the different ways people are exchanging money in other geographies that maybe most of our listeners aren't familiar with. As we'll say a few times in this series payments are truly local 

Julie: They are truly local don't forget to rate us and follow us on spotify and let us know how you like this conversation, too And maybe if there's something that you found unique about african payments that you didn't know before drop a note in the comments But with that, let's dive in. 

Thank you for agreeing to do this. You got, where are you based right now? I know that [00:03:00] there, you guys travel a little bit since you run African startups, but spend time in the U S for various reasons.

Kiaan: I'm in Cape Town, South Africa. 

Yele: Actually in South Africa as well, but currently in Johannesburg. Oh! Yeah, so I'll be in Cape Town next week. I heard it's floating there. 

Kiaan: Yeah, you're in South Africa at a very bad time. It's freaking horrible. Yeah. Why is it a bad time 

Julie: to be in South Africa right now?

Is the weather not great?  

Kiaan: It's cold. It's freezing. It's really cold and Cape Town's flooding right now. It's like torrential. 

Julie: Crazy. So this is your winter right now then? 

Kiaan: Yeah. This is like a peak winter. This is the worst I think I've ever seen Cape Town. It's really bad. 

Julie: Wow, man. Well, I hope it turns around soon. Well, I'd love to start off with just a little bit of your guys's background. So Kian, if you want to start, how did you get into payments and tell me a little bit about what your company is doing in this space? 

Kiaan: Yeah, sure. So I got [00:04:00] into payments now maybe eight years ago.

Right after university, I joined a startup called Root, which was the first fully digital bank on the continent. The idea was it was a bank account for developers. So full API access to a bank account and to a bank card. That was super fun was there for a few years, and then I joined Smile Identity, which did identity verification APIs throughout the African continent and markets.