For most of the past two decades, sending money across borders meant losing a big slice to the system. According to World Bank data from Q1 2024, the average cost of sending $200 to sub-Saharan Africa was 8.4%, more than four times the G20's target of 3% by 2027. 

On the SA-Zimbabwe corridor, a lifeline used by millions of Zimbabwean workers and their families, an IMF and World Bank diagnostic published in August 2024 found costs running as high as 12.7%. Send R200, and roughly R25 went to fees before a single rand reached its destination.

This was not a niche inconvenience. Remittances to Africa totalled $92.2 billion in 2024, according to the World Bank, roughly double the continent's total overseas development aid. These flows are how families pay school fees, cover medical bills, and keep small businesses alive. 

The infrastructure extracting that 8-12% wasn't sophisticated. It was a chain of intermediaries: Banks, agents, clearing houses and correspondent networks, each taking a margin and none of them communicating in real time. Transactions took days, cash dominated and competition was limited. The problem was institutional stagnation protected by regulatory fragmentation across 54 countries.

That combination of scale, pain and fragmentation is exactly what attracts builders.

The companies that moved first weren't startups in the current sense. They were patient, capital-intensive infrastructure projects that took years to show results. Mukuru, founded in 2004, spent two decades building what is now a network of 17 million customers across hundreds of corridors. 

Its 2020 acquisition of Zoona and subsequent launch of a mobile wallet in Zimbabwe made it the defining player in Southern African remittances. A partnership with MoneyGram extended its reach further. Mukuru proved the market existed and that it was possible to serve it reliably, even across multiple regulatory environments.

Onafriq, headquartered in Johannesburg and operating as MFS Africa until its 2023 rebrand, took a different approach. Rather than building its own corridors end to end, it aggregated them, connecting over 500 million mobile wallets and 200 million bank accounts across more than 40 African markets through a single API layer. By the time it had raised $323 million in total, including a $100 million Series C in late 2021, extended by a further $100 million in 2022, Onafriq had become the continent's largest digital payments network.

Neither company replaced the banks nor the mobile money operators. They connected them, creating interoperability where there had been islands.

Infrastructure at this scale only works if regulation moves with it. For most of the last decade, SA's regulatory environment for cross-border payments was cautious at best. Forex controls, compliance costs, and the SARB's traditional conservatism created structural friction that was simultaneously a moat for incumbents and a brake on innovation. That started to change.

The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), backed by Afreximbank and the African Union, launched with the explicit goal of enabling instant cross-border payments in local currencies across the continent, bypassing the dollar intermediation that drives much of the cost. Onafriq was among the first to pilot on the network, running a wallet-based transaction between Nigeria and Ghana in February 2026. In December 2025, Wise became the first international payments company to receive an Authorised Dealer Limited Activity licence from the SARB, and within months had announced a partnership with Capitec to offer international payments to the bank's growing customer base. FNB launched Globba on 11 November 2025, a cross-border payments product built on Mastercard Move, covering more than 120 countries at launch.

SA's 2026 Budget went further still: crypto assets were brought into formal capital flow regulation, a national payments system modernisation programme was announced, and cross-border investment rules were eased. The signal is consistent across regulators and incumbents alike. Cross-border payments innovation is now being actively enabled, not merely tolerated.

Against that backdrop, a newer cohort of SA companies has moved into the gaps the first wave didn't fill. These are not general-purpose platforms. They solve specific, narrow problems across borders.

Petl Pay, formerly Rafiki OS, targets the pain point that sits just beneath remittances: SME invoicing for cross-border trade. Getting paid across an African border when you're not a bank or a multinational involves navigating currency conversion, correspondent banking delays, and compliance requirements that small businesses aren't equipped to manage alone. Petl Pay automates that process. Unloc Money attacks a simpler problem with a similar focus: speed. International payments from SA remain slower than they should be, and Unloc is building against that constraint directly.

MoneyBadger and ZARU are operating one layer deeper. MoneyBadger has built crypto payment rails that now power Ozow's crypto payments offering, launched in February 2026, creating a practical bridge between digital assets and everyday commerce. ZARU is building institutional-grade blockchain infrastructure for rand-denominated stablecoin settlement. The premise: if SA's major institutions ran their cross-border transactions over a ZAR-backed stablecoin with proper oversight, the fee structure could drop dramatically.

NjiaPay, which raised a $2.1 million seed round led by Newion in March 2026, is solving a different layer entirely: payment orchestration for merchants trying to manage multiple payment service providers across African markets. Spun out of Talk360, it cut PSP integrations from six to one and delivered a 25% increase in checkout conversion.

These companies collectively represent a more specialised second generation, each one assuming the connectivity layer exists and building on top of it.

The acquisition that crystallised all of this was BVNK. Three South African founders, Jesse Hemson-Struthers, Donald Jackson, and Chris Harmse, founded the company in London in 2021, having previously built and sold a consumer crypto exchange called Coindirect.

The pivot was precise: rather than helping retail customers buy Bitcoin, build the enterprise infrastructure that lets businesses move stablecoins across borders at scale. BVNK became a platform for sending, receiving, and holding stablecoins while bridging them to traditional banking rails. It now processes more than $30 billion in annualised volume across 130-plus countries, with a client list that includes global fintechs, payment companies, and Visa Direct, whose $1.7 trillion real-time payments network BVNK powers with stablecoin settlement.

Mastercard paid R30 billion, approximately $1.8 billion, for that infrastructure. Just 15 months before the deal closed, BVNK had raised its Series B at a $750 million valuation. The acquisition was 2.4 times that, and it stands as the largest stablecoin acquisition ever recorded. The investor syndicate included Tiger Global, Visa Ventures, and Citi Ventures. Read the full story of the BVNK acquisition.

That deal didn't happen in isolation. Onafriq's $323 million in total funding, FNB's Globba launch, and the Wise-Capitec partnership all landed within the same compressed period. SA's cross-border payments stack has become globally legible. Acquirers and investors outside the continent can now understand what they're buying and what it's worth.

The momentum is real, but the question underneath it is whether SA's position is sustainable. 

The SARB's relative sophistication, Johannesburg's depth as a financial centre, and SA's existing correspondent banking relationships gave local founders a credible base to build from. But SA's forex controls, compliance overhead, and licensing costs are not trivial. 

Every company in this piece built its cross-border product while managing a regulatory environment that was, for most of the last decade, designed for capital control rather than capital flow. The fact that SA produced more cross-border payment infrastructure than any other African country, despite that friction, is the more interesting story.

The SA-Zimbabwe corridor, which cost families 12.7% in 2024, has not been fixed by a single product launch or regulatory update. Regulatory fragmentation across 54 countries remains the core structural challenge. And the cost of compliance in SA continues to filter out smaller players before they reach scale. 

SA has earned a lead. But the question remains whether it can hold it before the builders in Lagos, Nairobi and Cairo catch up.

This news was first featured in our 28 April ‘26 issue on Ruka's small business AI tools.

Read the full story of how three SA founders built BVNK and sold it to Mastercard for R30 billion. See how ZARU is building SA's institutional blockchain infrastructure for rand-denominated stablecoin settlement. Explore Petl Pay's automated invoicing for African cross-border trade and how Unloc Money is building the fastest international payments from SA.

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