Post Prospa, Rodney Jackson-Cole wants African payments settled in minutes with Bani

What happens when a Lagos importer pays a supplier in Nairobi? Her bank converts naira to dollars. The dollars travel to a correspondent bank in New York. That bank routes them to another correspondent, which converts them into Kenyan shillings and eventually pays the supplier.

The money has crossed the Atlantic twice to move between two African commercial capitals. The journey takes three to seven business days. Along the way, fees stack up in a region the World Bank has repeatedly ranked as the most expensive in the world for moving money, with average remittance costs of eight to ten per cent.

Bani, founded in 2022, is one of a wave of African companies trying to retire that route.

The startup builds cross-border payment infrastructure that lets African businesses collect local payments through bank transfer and mobile money, pay suppliers abroad, and settle in minutes rather than days, using local currency rails and stablecoin settlement. The company integrates directly with banks and says its customers save up to 25 per cent on cross-border transaction costs compared with traditional channels.

On Thursday, its co-founder and CEO, Rodney Jackson-Cole, described the problem to a room of journalists and creators at the Google office in Lagos with a trader’s impatience rather than a banker’s patience.

“Goods move faster than money on this continent,” he said. “A container can get from Mombasa to Lagos before the payment for it clears. Every day the money is in transit is a day of stock not ordered, staff not paid, and deals lost. We built Bani because that wait is not a law of nature. It is just old plumbing.”

The plumbing is getting older and thinner. Global banks have spent the past several years pulling out of African correspondent banking, the network of relationships that international payments depend on. Barclays completed its exit from the continent in 2022, and Standard Chartered has since divested businesses across several African markets.

Each withdrawal narrows the pipes that African trade payments must squeeze through, even as the trade itself grows. Africa’s cross-border payments market was estimated at 329 billion dollars in 2025 and is projected to reach a trillion dollars by 2035.

Jackson-Cole is building for that trillion. This is his second startup: he previously co-founded Prospa, the Y Combinator-backed Nigerian business banking company, where he was chief technology officer. Before that, he was director and CTO at NestBank.

He has spent his career on the same question from different angles: why is it so hard for an African business to move money?

“At Prospa we gave small businesses accounts in five minutes, and then watched them wait five days to pay a supplier in China,” he said. “The account was never the hard part. The rails were. So this time we went after the rails.”

Bani has taken an unfashionable route to building them. In a sector known for large funding rounds, the company has raised about $100,000 to date and runs on its own revenue. Jackson-Cole presented that as a choice as much as a constraint.

“Payments is a trust business, and trust does not come from a funding announcement,” he said. “It comes from the ten thousandth transaction that settled exactly like the first. We wanted to prove the model with customers’ money moving, not investors’ money raised. The revenue came first. Whatever we raise after this, we raise on our own terms.”

Asked how Bani plans to expand its reach, he pointed to the trade corridors where African businesses already operate: West Africa to East Africa, Nigeria to China, and the growing lanes opened by the African Continental Free Trade Area. The near-term work, he said, is adding currencies, deepening bank integrations, and meeting the compliance bar in each new market, which he called the real moat in cross-border payments.

“Anyone can move money once,” he said. “Moving it every day, in and out of a dozen regulatory regimes, with every transaction accounted for, is the actual product. It is slow to build, and that is exactly why it is worth building.”

Bani is an alumnus of Google’s startup ecosystem programs and builds on Google Cloud. Its bet sits inside a larger shift: institutions across the continent, from the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System to a generation of fintechs, are working to keep African payments on African rails. If they succeed, the strange geography of the Lagos-to-Nairobi payment, out through New York and back, will read in a few years like a story from another era.

For now, the importer is still waiting on her transfer. Companies like Bani are competing to make that wait minutes long and to keep the fee at home.