Verto co-founder Anthony Oduu on solving Nigeria’s $30 billion e-commerce liquidity crisis

Nigeria’s e-commerce sector is no longer a nascent promise; it is a heavyweight contender projected to exceed $30 billion this year, more than double from $15 billion in 2023, fundamentally reshaping the country’s non-oil export earnings, which reached $6.1 billion in 2025. Yet, beneath the slick interfaces of digital shopfronts lies a fractured reality.

While SMEs across the country can seamlessly find a buyer in London or Shanghai in seconds, the journey of repatriating that revenue back to a local bank account is fraught with leaks. From opaque foreign exchange (FX) spreads to the archaic black box of correspondent banking, the financial plumbing of African trade is struggling to keep pace with its digital ambitions.

In an exclusive chat with Technext, Anthony Oduu, co-founder and CTPO of Verto, pulls back the curtain on these structural failures. Having navigated the financial trenches from early Y Combinator days to scaling global infrastructure, Oduu isn’t just building another payment button. He is re-engineering the rails of emerging-market trade to ensure that, for African SMEs, global reach doesn’t come at the cost of margin erosion.

The core problem, according to Oduu, is a profound mismatch between market access and settlement infrastructure. Digital platforms have democratised the ability to sell globally, but the underlying payment systems remain old school and analogue.

“The market access has become so digital that the settlement infrastructure is still largely opaque,” Oduu explains. For a Nigerian merchant, selling a product is the easy part. The friction begins at the point of payment. Correspondent banks, intermediaries that SMEs often never interact with directly, charge fees at every stop. Combined with hidden FX spreads, these costs act as a leak in the pipes, often consuming the thin margin that separates a profitable trade from a loss.

The CBN 180-day compliance race

The pressure on Nigerian exporters intensified in January 2025, when the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) suspended extensions for the 180-day export proceeds repatriation rule. This created a rigid, non-negotiable window that often forced businesses to repatriate funds regardless of whether FX rates were favourable.

“If they are forced to bring proceeds back at the wrong time through a provider without good liquidity, they lose meaningful margin,” Oduu notes.

In the high-stakes world of non-oil exports, from cashews to beans, the difference between profit and loss is often found in the narrow crevice of the FX spread. Verto’s solution isn’t to bypass these regulations but to professionalise how SMEs meet them. By offering multicurrency wallets in over 50 currencies, Verto allows merchants to hold funds and monitor real-time pricing, executing trades only when the target rates are reached. “Compliance should not mean margin destruction,” Oduu argues. “The answer is better treasury planning, not avoidance.”

Traditional FX pricing has long been a black box for African businesses. Exporters see a final rate but are blind to the underlying spread, corresponding banking fees, and the depth of available liquidity.

Oduu and his team chose to dismantle this opacity by building a marketplace that aggregates liquidity from over 300 global providers, including banks, fintechs, and multinational corporations. This creates a transparent ecosystem where two counterparties can trade directly at mutually comfortable rates, shaving off the middle-layer fees that usually haemorrhage SME capital.

“The more liquidity sources you create, the better price discovery you get,” Oduu says. This isn’t just theory; Verto’s infrastructure has proven its effectiveness, reducing transaction costs by 40% and accelerating processing times by 30%. By providing local collection accounts, such as a Kenyan Shilling account for a Lagos-based merchant, Verto bypasses the traditional SWIFT-reliant hurdles that add unnecessary layers of cost.

Catering to the 92% African ‘e-commerce’ SMEs still left out

Perhaps the most startling statistic discussed was the staggering 92% of African SMEs that still struggle with cross-border payments, often because traditional banks lock them out with burdensome legacy compliance requirements. These banks frequently attempt to treat a small logistics player as if it were a Fortune 500 company, demanding consistent, decade-long records that simply do not exist in the informal sector.

“SMEs are the real businesses in Africa. They employ most people,” Oduu remarked. However, traditional banks continue to treat these nimble entities like large, slow-moving corporates. The resulting friction often pushes “good businesses” back into informal, risky channels.

Verto’s approach is fundamentally different: a risk-based onboarding framework that focuses on trade reality over bureaucratic consistency. By drilling into bank statements and understanding the actual flow of funds and transaction purposes, they create a bespoke picture of the customer. “The opportunity is not to ignore the informality; it is to basically bring what I would call ‘good businesses’ into the regulated system,” Oduu said.

The conversation inevitably turned to the sad reality that Africa is currently not trading with itself. Only 17% of African exports currently remain within the continent. Oduu suggests this isn’t a trade problem but an interoperability crisis.

Also read: Nigeria Q1 2026 GDP: Trade and real estate outweigh tech

Currently, a trade between Nigeria and Ghana often requires settlement in US dollars or euros, adding unnecessary cost, settlement delays, and FX risk. While solutions like the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) are attempting to bridge this gap, Verto is solving this by building “practical interoperability” at the business layer. By facilitating local collection and payout, now operational in over 12 African countries, Verto allows a Kenyan merchant to be paid in shillings and the Nigerian exporter to receive naira instantly. This localisation of trade is essential if the continent is to move beyond its dependence on non-local currencies and to take intra-African trade to at least 50% in the next decade.

In an era of plug-and-play APIs, Oduu made the conscious decision to build Verto’s backend from the ground up. This wasn’t just a technical preference; it was a strategic necessity because for Oduu, relying on third-party APIs was never an option for solving a problem this deep.

“You have to start from what problem are you solving? Are you solving a symptom or an infrastructure problem?” he asked. By owning the vertical, from payment rails to the compliance engine, Verto maintains total control over routing and pricing. This ownership also allows them to embed compliance into the product rather than treating it as an “afterthought”. This enables Verto to move between $30 and $40 billion annually across 190 countries.

Asked about the possible innovations that would scale up intra-African trade, Oduu sees a convergence of technologies rather than a single “magic bullet”. The next frontier will likely involve a combination of real-time local payment rails, multicurrency wallets, and “agentic AI” to handle automated compliance and decision-making.

While on stablecoins, Oduu was cautiously optimistic, noting that they only truly scale when both the sender and receiver are willing to stay “on-chain”. “Unless every customer is willing to keep a wallet, as long as we still have off-ramping taking place, stablecoin on its own is not the answer,” he warned.

The future of repatriation, in Oduu’s view, will be programmable. “The winner will be the business that can bring all of this together,” Oduu concludes. The winner will be the business that can prove, through data, that its fund movements are clean, transparent, and compliant. For the Nigerian exporter, that means a future where they finally have control over their own money.