• Ripple Labs and Onafriq announce a strategic partnership to improve payments between Africa and new markets. 

• Onafriq is known as one of the leading fintech platforms in Africa with over 300,000 agents spread across Nigeria.

Ripple Labs has announced a strategic partnership with Onafriq, formerly known as MFS Africa to expand Africa’s cross-border payments to new markets such as the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), the UK, and Australia. Onafriq exists as an omnichannel network of networks that ensures that partners are provided with a single pathway to unlock the abilities of cross-border and cross-platform payment solutions.

For several years, Ripple has supported crypto-enabled, cross-border payments to individuals and businesses, and we are particularly excited to expand the reach of our solution into Africa thanks to our Onafriq partnership.

Ripple’s crypto-enabled payments technology, Ripple Payments is being utilized by Onafriq as part of the plans to open up new payment corridors between Africa and other markets. Thanks to Onafriq’s pan-African network1, customers can facilitate fast and cost-effective remittance as well as business payments to 27 African countries using PayAngel in the UK, Pyypl in the GCC, and Zazi Transfer in Australia. Over the years, cross-border transactions have been affected by long settlement times, unreliability, and excessive costs

However, Onafriq has offset these problems using Ripple’s crypto technology and made International money transfers to Africa convenient. Aaron Sears, SVP, of Global Customer Success at Ripple spoke about this:

For several years, Ripple has supported crypto-enabled, cross-border payments to individuals and businesses, and we are particularly excited to expand the reach of our solution into Africa thanks to our Onafriq partnership. Connecting our partners PayAngel, Pyppl and Zazi Transfer with Onafriq over Ripple Payments will bring the benefits of faster and more cost-effective cross-border payments to individuals seeking to send money into Africa from around the globe.

Ripple Addressing Complex Cross-border Challenges

Onafriq has the largest mobile money movement footprint across Africa with more than 500 million mobile wallets in about 40 African countries. It operates over 1300 payment corridors in Africa. The fintech platform connects to over 200 million bank accounts with over 300,000 agents in Nigeria alone. 

Ripple as the main partner is the first company to solve the pain points of cross-border payment using blockchain and crypto. Building blockchain-enabled payment infrastructure from start to finish is one of the most difficult things to do, but was done by Ripple. After that, the company ensured that its product offerings were expanded to new address areas and this includes liquidity management and tokenization. 

As of the time of writing, Ripple had customers spread across over 55 countries, and 6 continents while facilitating payments in over 70 markets according to the press release. 

Dare Okoudjou, Founder & CEO at Onafriq, spoke about its mission and the partnership with Ripple:

Our mission is to make borders matter less when it comes to payment within, to, and from Africa. We are advancing this mission through our partnership with Ripple, which is already enabling new types of connections with fintechs such as PayAngel, Pyppl, and Zazi Transfer. These connections are set to enable fast, secure, and low-cost remittances at scale between Africa and the rest of the world, and represent a bold first step for our crypto strategy to leverage blockchain technologies to amplify our impact on people and businesses on the continent.