As Africa struggles to close the gap on intra-continental trade, one startup is showing how fintech can break through barriers of currency volatility and regulatory complexity, and it’s just been awarded $1 million to accelerate its mission.

Verto, a London-based cross-border payments platform founded by Nigerian-British entrepreneur Ola Oyetayo, has won this year’s prestigious $1 million Milken-Motsepe Prize in FinTech for its groundbreaking work helping small African businesses move money seamlessly across fragmented financial landscapes.

While Africa’s intra-continental trade sits at a modest 15% of its overall global trade, lagging behind other regions, Verto’s business-to-business platform offers a way to unlock that potential by putting local currencies first.

“One of the biggest barriers to effective trade on the continent is that many African currencies are very illiquid and considered exotic,” Oyetayo told The Africa Report.

“There’s also extreme volatility. So you have a situation where most people trust the greenback, the US dollar, rather than their local currency.”

With Verto, African businesses can skip intermediary fees, transact in dozens of currencies, and settle payments quickly, all while sidestepping the traditional banking sector’s rigid risk frameworks.

“If you build a situation where Africans can easily transact in their local currencies, it will help level the playing field,” Oyetayo added.

By limiting the financial services it offers, Verto has been able to simplify regulatory compliance, building its own internal risk models that focus on the nature of the businesses rather than the countries they’re from.

Oyetayo sees the current geopolitical climate as a major opportunity for Africa, especially under the promises of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).

“The ability for fast-growing, high-populated markets to trade and transact with each other essentially means that, at the end of the day, regardless of what’s happening in the US, these big populations and markets can do more for themselves by transacting more,” he said.

“There’s no reason why if I’m doing business in Africa, my supply chain 100% faces off to Asia, the US or Europe.”

Verto is currently licensed to operate in Nigeria, South Africa, and Kenya, with Tanzania next on its expansion list.

The Milken-Motsepe Innovation Prize Program, launched in 2021 by American billionaire Michael Milken and South African billionaire Patrice Motsepe, is a multimillion-dollar global competition designed to incentivize bold solutions to Africa’s pressing challenges.

This year’s $1 million grand prize was announced on May 7 at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles.

To date, the program has distributed over $6 million to around 50 innovators worldwide, supporting projects spanning agro-tech for smallholder farmers to off-grid green electricity generation.

Verto emerged as one of 10 finalists for this year’s prize, each receiving $100,000 in funding before the grand prize was awarded.

Other finalists included Chumz, a Kenyan savings and investment platform that uses behavioral psychology and gamification to drive micro-investments, and Oze, a Ghanaian digital lending platform for small and medium-sized enterprises.

The mood at the Los Angeles awards event was decidedly optimistic about Africa’s prospects.

“There’s no part of the world where per capita income is going to grow faster than in Africa,” Michael Milken said.

“It’s a [big] market, and it’s a lot easier to get a foothold today than it will be in a decade.”

Precious Moloi-Motsepe, co-founder of the Motsepe Foundation, underscored how Africa’s fintech boom builds on longstanding community traditions like South Africa’s stokvel (community savings groups).

“It is no surprise that Africa’s uptake of mobile money techniques has taken off,” she said.

“Our lack of infrastructure makes it impossible, or rather challenging, for people who want to start their own businesses; people who want to access finance and reliable payment systems to be able to run their businesses successfully.”

Oyetayo, for his part, left the conference energized.

“One of the biggest themes of this conference has been the demographic potential of the African continent from an investment perspective,” he said.

“So I’m very excited and bullish about the future of the continent given all the good work that people are doing to innovate and help facilitate transactions and trade.”