$250M Moved and the Hidden Dollar Shortage Behind Africa’s Payments

“Whenever you say Africa, everybody stops.” I said it with a smile, but I was naming a real problem, one that costs the continent’s businesses dearly every single day. Moving money into or out of an emerging market is never as seamless as anyone would like, and Nkiru Uwaje has spent the last two years building a company to fix the specific, hidden reason why. She is the COO and co-founder of MANSA, a Tether-backed liquidity network that uses stablecoins to settle cross-border payments, and this was our second conversation with her in a year.

A year ago, she explained the vision. This time, at Money 20/20 Europe, she came back with receipts: more than $250 million in payments financed in under two years, and a sharp diagnosis of the bottleneck nobody outside the industry talks about. It is not technology. It is dollars.

The real bottleneck is a dollar shortage

The insight that anchors MANSA is one most people get wrong. The friction in African and other emerging-market payments is usually blamed on bad technology or red tape. Uwaje’s argument is that the more profound problem is liquidity, specifically, the limited supply of US dollars available through local banks.

“One of the key things is seeing how much friction there is in terms of dollar availability within the African market. We give these payments companies the necessary dollar float and liquidity through stablecoins, through USDT, so they can go into these fiat currencies.”

Here is how that works in practice. A payments company in an emerging market needs dollars to settle a cross-border transaction, but its local bank can only supply so many. MANSA steps in with USDT float, letting that company move from a local currency, say the South African rand, into USDT, and out to dollars, in under half a day rather than through a painful, days-long scramble. The stablecoin is not the speculative asset here; it is the working capital. It is the same dollar-access issue that Fincra attacks from the rails side, viewed instead through the lens of liquidity.

From “no” to “yes,” automatically

I asked Uwaje what the hurdles are between a payment request and a funded flow, expecting a long list. Her answer was striking: “Probably very little.” That is not carelessness, it is engineering. MANSA has built a stack that screens each transaction, runs the compliance checks (KYC, KYB, AML) and works only with trusted, known counterparties, which means the manual review that slows most of this work down has largely been automated away.

That automation is what lets a 25-person team finance hundreds of millions in payments. And the reason MANSA keeps returning to emerging markets, she explained, is that they share one problem: dollar availability from banks is finite, so businesses must find reliable alternatives or stay stuck. The pattern repeats from Nigeria to Argentina to Colombia. As she put it, the term “emerging markets” is almost too narrow because the same friction shows up across the developing world, everywhere that is not the global north. MANSA’s backing reflects how seriously that opportunity is taken: the company raised a $10 million seed round led by Tether, the issuer of the very stablecoin its model runs on.

Why a Bitcoin crash barely registers

We spoke on a day when Bitcoin was in free fall, so I asked how the team reacts to that kind of volatility. Her answer drew a line that more people in crypto should understand.

“The great thing is we’re not really affected by Bitcoin too much, because we’re dealing in the stablecoin space. For sure it has an adverse effect on the wider industry, the whole ecosystem reacts. But markets always have fluctuations. You have to be resilient enough to understand that this wave too will pass.”

This is the quiet strength of a stablecoin-native business. When your product is dollar liquidity rather than a bet on a token’s price, a brutal day for Bitcoin is someone else’s problem. Uwaje was candid that building through what she called one of the most taxing downturns of the last decade has been a lesson in resilience: contingency planning, starting things that feel too early, and keeping a lean team motivated through the inevitable ups and downs. The business has survived precisely because it is insulated from the speculation that defines the headlines.

Agentic payments, with a human on the button

On the conference’s obsession of the year, agentic AI, Uwaje had a more grounded view than most, and a structural reason for it. Stablecoins and agentic payments, she argued, fit hand in hand because you cannot have programmable, automated money movement without programmable money underneath it: stablecoins, smart contracts and the right logic.

But she was careful not to oversell the timeline. In the near future, she expects agentic tools to pre-fill and orchestrate payments, here is the invoice, here is who needs paying, while a human still presses the button to validate that everything is correct. “It’s more about not taking out the human, but making everything a little bit more efficient,” she said, with the honest aside that most of us would happily trade a nine-hour day for a four-hour one. There are still real inefficiencies in the way, she cautioned. It will be a journey, not an overnight switch.

Why this is relevant for the Dutch and European reader

For a European audience, MANSA reframes what stablecoins are actually for. The Western conversation fixates on whether stablecoins threaten banks or how they will be regulated under MiCA. Uwaje’s company is a reminder that in much of the world they are already doing essential, unglamorous work: supplying the dollar liquidity that lets a business in Lagos or Bogotá get paid this week instead of next.

That has direct relevance for European firms. Any Dutch or European company trading with suppliers and customers in emerging markets runs straight into the same dollar-liquidity wall, and the cost of that friction lands in their margins. A business like MANSA is part of how that wall comes down. Next on its roadmap, Uwaje said, is more adoption among traditional players such as asset managers, building out China payout rails, and developing its own agentic AI. For Europe, the lesson is that the most consequential use of stablecoins may not be in Amsterdam or Frankfurt at all, but in the corridors that connect them to the rest of the world. For more on those corridors, see our conversation with 3S Money.

This interview was recorded live at Money 20/20 Europe 2026 at the Amsterdam RAI. For more conversations with the people moving money across borders, watch the full Cryptofocus series.