At a media briefing on the sidelines of Moonshot by TechCabal 2026 in Lagos, Grey co-founder and CEO Idorenyin Obong laid out a quietly radical idea: African businesses should be able to pay each other without the US dollar sitting in the middle of every transaction. The Y Combinator-backed payments company says it has built direct currency conversion routes that make that possible, cutting out the intermediary step that has long added cost and friction to intra-African trade.
The problem is more common than most people realise. A Nigerian business paying a Kenyan supplier today typically has to convert naira into dollars first, then dollars into Kenyan shillings. That extra leg means extra fees, extra waiting, and extra exposure to exchange rate swings. "Most times, if you're trading within Africa, there's always some form of intermediary currency," Obong said at the briefing. "We've built out these currency pairs, these exotic currency pairs, such that you never have to go in between to the USD."
Grey says its infrastructure supports real-time settlement across several currencies, with liquidity arrangements in place for customers in Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana to collect and send money. The goal is to reduce how often businesses have to hunt for foreign exchange through multiple middlemen, which is where a lot of the cost and delay currently lives.
The scale of the issue goes well beyond any single company. In October, the Bank for International Settlements noted that many payments between African countries still travel through correspondent banking networks outside the continent, driving up costs and adding operational risk. Grey is not alone in trying to fix this. The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System, developed by Afreximbank in partnership with African institutions, has been building out local currency payment infrastructure across the continent.
The question now is how quickly these parallel efforts translate into real, everyday savings for the small and mid-sized businesses carrying African trade on their backs.
Originally published by TechCabal.