F-Squared Podcast

Africa Doesn't Have a Dollar Problem. It Has a Plumbing Problem.

African traders earn in Europe and pay in China. Stablecoins are finally solving that triangular liquidity gap — and reshaping how Africa-Asia trade finance works. April Long spent thirteen years inside corridor banking — Standard Chartered, Gulf African Bank, and the Africa-Asia fintech ecosystem. She watched the cost of stablecoin liquidity fall from unworkable to roughly 50 basis points round-trip. This episode is her structural explanation of why that shift matters more than most people in African trade finance currently understand. “Money needs to flow in a triangular structure — receiving from Europe, paying to China. Africa lacks a financial hub where money can flow in and out freely. Consequently, money is forced to find fragmented, inefficient ways to flow.” — April Long What You Will Hear: 0:00 - Introduction 07:54 - The Corridor Banking Model. 14:01 - How Off-Ramp Costs Change the Game for Stablecoins 21:00 - The Triangular Liquidity Problem - Who is Africa Selling to and Where Are we Buying From? 28:00 - Compliance as Structural Barrier 33:20 - How Stablecoins Act Like a Financial Hub 37:30 - Why Nigeria Changed First 41:00 - The Velocity Argument — Turning Money Over Fast and How it Grows the Economy 53:09 - The China Shift — Why China-Africa trade grew 18% in 2025 Read by 16,000+ operators, investors, and practitioners across 126 countries. Subscribe: https://frontierfintech.substack.com Samora Kariuki (Host): https://www.linkedin.com/in/samorakariuki/ April Long (Guest): https://www.linkedin.com/in/longapril/ Frontier Fintech: https://frontierfintech.substack.com If this episode was useful, a like or subscription takes four seconds and helps independent media reach more of the right people. The algorithm runs on signals — yours included.

Building the Rails for African Trade: Inside Onafriq | Dare Okoudjou

Africa's mobile money networks have over 800 million registered accounts spread across dozens of closed loops. Moving money between them; across borders, currencies, and regulatory jurisdictions, remains the unfinished infrastructure project of a generation. Onafriq was built on the thesis that someone had to connect the dots. Samora Kariuki sits down with Dare Okoudjou, founder and CEO of Onafriq (formerly MFS Africa), the Pan-African payment network that connects mobile money wallets, bank accounts, cards, and now stablecoin rails across 40+ countries. Dare's path is unusual: an engineer who trained at PricewaterhouseCoopers in Paris, helped architect MTN Mobile Money across Africa from 2006 to 2009, and then left to build the interoperability layer he could see the market would eventually require. Sixteen years later, the vision has proven out, though the path there looked almost nothing like the original plan. This conversation is a rare inside account of what it actually takes to build foundational financial infrastructure in Africa. Dare breaks down the layered architecture of cross-border payments (messaging, risk, currency, settlement), the strategic acquisitions of Beyonic and GTP that accelerated Onafriq's enterprise relationships, and why the platform is now placing simultaneous bets on mobile money interoperability, cards, PAPSS, and stablecoins. He also challenges the entire African fintech industry to ask whether mobile money, as currently architected, is still the right model. In This Episode, You Will Hear: * The MTN Origin: How Dare helped build the foundations of MTN MoMo across Africa and why that experience made the MFS Africa opportunity obvious in retrospect. * The Fax Machine Problem: Why being early to a network business means spending years being nearly useless, and why the goal is simply not to die until the vision comes true. * The Remittance Framing Problem: Why calling intra-African cross-border payments "remittances" actively harms how banks, investors, and regulators engage with the industry. * The Acquisition Logic: Why Onafriq bought Beyonic and GTP, and what enterprise relationships with banks actually require that organic sales cannot deliver. * Payments Always Revert to Standard: Why Dare believes mobile money must achieve GSM-style interoperability or risk being absorbed into the card standard. * The Stablecoin Thesis: Why stablecoins are best understood as programmable mobile money for the internet, and why the dollar stablecoin narrative may create systemic risks for African banking systems. * If M-Pesa Were Built Today: The sharpest strategic question in African fintech, posed by someone who was in the room when the original was designed. Key Quote: "The goal was simply not to die until it came true." Connect with Us: * Samora Kariuki (Host): https://www.linkedin.com/in/samorakariuki/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/samorakariuki/] * Dare Okoudjou (Guest): https://www.linkedin.com/in/dare-okoudjou/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/dare-okoudjou/] Frontier Fintech: https://frontierfintech.substack.com [https://frontierfintech.substack.com]

Building Infrastructure That Puts You in Control of Your Money | Farzam Ehsani, Valr

Valr is Africa's largest crypto exchange by volume, but the business has evolved well beyond exchange. Under founder Farzam Ehsani, Valr now provides modular on-chain financial infrastructure that banks and telcos plug into to offer their own customers crypto exposure, stablecoin savings, tokenised assets, and cross-border settlement. In a sector where reputational risk is the norm, the word that keeps coming up around Valr is "respect." Farzam's path to building it has been circuitous. His family are Bahá'ís of Persian origin who were persecuted in Iran and settled in Nairobi in 1975. He grew up in Westlands, moved through Deloitte in San Francisco and McKinsey in Johannesburg, and joined Rand Merchant Bank during the Greek debt crisis, where he dismissed Bitcoin as a scam before falling into the rabbit hole that led him to set up the bank's blockchain unit and ultimately leave to build Valr in 2018. In this conversation with Samora Kariuki, Farzam covers how Valr was built, why an exchange was the logical starting point, and how the business expanded into institutional infrastructure. He also reveals an unexpected source of conviction: a 1999 Bahá'í document that predicted the replacement of fragmented monetary systems by a single electronic currency, a decade before Bitcoin existed. In this episode, you'll learn: * How Farzam's journey from Westlands to Deloitte, McKinsey, and Rand Merchant Bank led to founding Valr. * Why an exchange — a marketplace where people express divergent views by buying or selling — was the most logical starting point, and how Valr expanded from there. * How Valr's B2B2C model provides modular on-chain financial infrastructure (custody, liquidity, matching engines, risk engines) to institutions across Africa. * The concept of double-spending: the foundational problem Bitcoin solves that most crypto commentators never discuss. * Why the Bitcoin price is fundamentally a story about fiat devaluation, not market speculation. * How a 1999 Bahá'í prophecy about a universal electronic currency — written a decade before Bitcoin — underpins Farzam's worldview on where money is heading. * Why stablecoins pegged to the US dollar inherit the dollar's long-term fragility — and what the "free banking era" tells us about what comes next. * How fractional reserve banking works identically with Bitcoin, and why crypto doesn't eliminate the risk of bank runs. * Why regulatory maturity — not market size — is the key variable in Valr's expansion across Kenya, Nigeria, and beyond. Key Quote: "I can host my files, music, and documents locally on my phone or computer, but I do not have that option for money. I have to rely on someone else's servers to show me my balance on their database." Connect with Us: * Samora Kariuki (Host): https://www.linkedin.com/in/samorakariuki/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/samorakariuki/] * Farzam Ehsani (Guest): https://www.linkedin.com/in/faborsa/https://www.linkedin.com/in/farzam-ehsani/ * Frontier Fintech: www.frontierfintech.substack.com [http://www.frontierfintech.substack.com] * Useful Video on Farzam’s Thinking - https://youtu.be/5lup0b-FWBM?si=juJWtprP2iG8kfni

Inside the Bank Building Africa's First Regulated Digital Asset Stack | ABSA CIB

Banks have spent decades building the infrastructure that makes money move. Now, a new set of rails; blockchain, stablecoins, tokenized assets,  is being laid alongside those systems. The question isn't whether banks will have to engage with digital assets. It's whether they'll do it in time, and whether they'll do it right. Rob Downes, Nkahiseng Ralepeli, and Robyn Lawson lead the digital assets team inside ABSA's Corporate and Investment Bank. Their journey started not with a bold strategic declaration, but with a quiet invitation, Project Khokha [https://www.resbank.co.za/content/dam/sarb/publications/media-releases/2022/project-khokha-2/Project%20Khokha%202%20Full%20Report%206%20April%202022.pdf], the South African Reserve Bank's blockchain research initiative in 2021. Two weeks after FTX collapsed, they walked into Group Exco to make the case for why ABSA needed to move. This episode is the inside account of what happened next: three years of internal education, regulatory navigation, technical integration, and careful product sequencing that has produced what the team believes is one of the first regulated digital asset custody offerings on the continent and a gold-backed stablecoin built with regulator visibility by design. Samora Kariuki sits down with the ABSA digital assets team to work through what it actually takes for a Tier-1 African bank to build in this space. The conversation covers the internal politics of getting risk and compliance on board, why custody was the right first product, the surprising bottleneck in tech integration, the demand signal they're seeing from institutional clients around tokenized assets and stablecoins, and how they've designed their gold-backed stablecoin to bring regulators along rather than force a confrontation. In This Episode, You Will Hear: * Why ABSA started this team in the depths of the 2022 crypto winter and why they called it the "digital assets team," not the crypto team * The counterintuitive insight from Robyn: compliance and financial crime were enablers, not blockers, the harder conversation was with tech * Why custody was the correct first product: wallet infrastructure as the foundation for every downstream digital asset service * How ABSA is thinking about institutional demand from Bitcoin strategic reserves to tokenized real-world assets that generate yield * The rich data problem: when you can see a Bitcoin's entire transaction history going back a decade, what does that mean for risk and KYC policy? * How ABSA embedded zero-knowledge proofs into its gold-backed stablecoin to serve privacy-sensitive institutional clients * The cross-border stablecoin opportunity, and why the CASP regulatory framework in South Africa is creating clarity that other markets lack * What expansion across ABSA's African footprint looks like now that the infrastructure is built Key Quote: "The growth in stablecoins, crypto, and financial market infrastructure using blockchain are threats to pan-African and global banks like ours, and we need to respond." — Rob Downes Connect with Us: * Samora Kariuki (Host): https://www.linkedin.com/in/samorakariuki/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/samorakariuki/] * Rob Downes: https://www.linkedin.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-downes-a970931/ * Nkahiseng Ralepeli: https://www.linkedin.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/nkahiseng-ralepeli-46a962a6/ * Robyn Lawson: https://www.linkedin.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/robyn-lawson-online/ Frontier Fintech: www.frontierfintech.substack.com [http://www.frontierfintech.substack.com]

The Operating System for Stablecoins: Beyond the Crypto Hype | Stone Atwine

For an operator moving millions across borders, Stone Atwine has come to understand where there’s real value to be created and where hype dominates. For him, having built his Fintech chops in a Mobile Money region, the value proposition for Stablecoins became evident almost immediately.  Why manage 10 different bank accounts and wait days for SWIFT when you can run a continental treasury from a single USDT buffer? Stone Atwine is a battle-tested fintech veteran who was talking about unit economics long before the "Venture Winter" made it cool. From solving "black tax" remittances for his grandmother to building Eversend on a lean $1.2M seed round, Stone has transitioned the company from a B2C wallet to the high-leverage B2B infrastructure powering African trade. This conversation moves away from the chatter about web3 towards how companies are solving real treasury challenges with stablecoins. Stone breaks down his "4-Level" payment architecture framework, a system that replaces traditional pre-funding with "Just-in-Time" liquidity. He explains why Eversend has completely abandoned SWIFT for internal operations and why the future of money looks like e-money on open rails. In This Episode, You Will Hear: * The Death of SWIFT: Why Eversend no longer uses traditional bank messaging for internal treasury. * Centralized Stablecoin Treasury: Moving from fragmented local accounts to a single USDC buffer for 30-minute rebalancing. * The Settlement Tension: Why "Just-in-Time" instant settlement can sometimes be costlier than traditional netting. * Global Use Cases: Why players like Deel and Wise are the perfect fit for stablecoin infrastructure. * Evaluating the Stack: What banks need to learn about custodial services like Fireblocks and security audits. * The Issuance Arms Race: Why JPMorgan and Citi, not just Tether, could dominate the future of yield-bearing reserves. * CBDCs vs. Private Stablecoins: Why the BIS mBridge is a "brilliant idea" but local stablecoin mandates may be the more practical path. "Stablecoins are basically e-money... but with a global ability to move on a blockchain ledger instead of a telco's ledger. It’s just-in-time financing for the real world." Connect with Us: * Samora Kariuki (Host): https://www.linkedin.com/in/samorakariuki/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/samorakariuki/] * Stone Atwine (Guest): https://www.linkedin.com/in/stoneatwine/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/stoneatwine/] * Frontier Fintech: https://frontierfintech.substack.com/ [https://frontierfintech.substack.com/]