Remittances are the new gold rush for African fintechs. In 2023, over $100 billion flowed into the continent, and those numbers are definitely higher in 2025. 

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This influx is sparking fierce competition across the ecosystem. Established players like LemFi and NALA are expanding beyond Africa. New entrants like Juicyway, which raised $3 million, and giant companies like Moniepoint and Bamboo have extended their product lines to include remittance services.

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With this opportunity, everyone's scrambling to build the next great remittance app, mostly competing on the same playbook—lower fees and better exchange rates. It's like watching a price war where everyone loses margin while customers barely notice the difference between 2% and 1.8% fees.

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But the the most successful companies have moved beyond pricing wars, according to industry experts who recently shared insights during one of our webinars. Eric Wainana (General Manager of Africa at Conduit), Grace Maina (Sales and Partnerships Manager EA at Kora), and Hyginus Ugwumba (Co-Founder of Cash Remit) revealed that leading companies are building differentiated experiences that solve real problems for Africans in diaspora communities.

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If you're building or running a remittance company and wondering why your perfectly competitive rates aren't translating to growth, you're not alone. This post reveals five key areas where modern companies innovate beyond traditional fee competition.

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1. Speed and instant settlement

No one will take you seriously if your remittance business can’t power near-instant transactions. Your users are not just sending $25 back home to their mum; some are running businesses that need immediate cashflow. 
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Hyginus Ugwumba, Co-Founder of Cash Remit, shares:

The conversation has moved on from fees now. Speed is super important. These days, most Africans in the diaspora have a project back home that they need to fund. It could be that they're building an estate in Lagos or running a company back home, so they need to have funds back home to settle all their obligations.

The market has divided remittance companies into two categories: those that deliver in minutes, and those that are becoming irrelevant. I see some very big remittance companies in Australia, and they’re proposing one to two days for their remittance transfers, and I can just tell that they won’t be able to compete with more agile remittance companies because users have better options. 

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Think about it from a customer's perspective. If you're in London managing a business in Lagos, waiting two days for a payment to clear can mean losing suppliers, missing deadlines, or watching opportunities slip away. Companies offering real-time settlements enable their customers to operate businesses across continents as if they were in the same city.

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One major challenges that causes delays is the difficulty in accessing competitive FX rates. With Kora, remittance companies can access competitive FX rates and also receive support with pre-funding in cases of cash flow difficulty.  

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2. Convenience and user experience

Another way you can stand out is through convenience and great user experience. For example, you can offer services that make it easy for people to fund their remittance apps.

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For many remittance apps, a user has to first fund their wallet from their bank account, debit card, or virtual account number. Most of these methods require multiple steps that are not convenient. To make this experience better, some remittance companies, like Monieworld (by Moniepoint) and LemFi, now allow users to link their Apple Pay or Google Pay accounts to their remittance apps. 

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Why is this a big deal? Many users already use Apple Pay for their daily expenses. Giving them the option to link their digital wallet to your remittance app eliminates the long process of funding through other means.

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Another way to improve the experience is to help them compare FX rates across different platforms. So, in addition to being an app to send money, you become the source of truth for checking exchange rates. Kora's Conversion API can help you build this functionality. Check out the API docs here.

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3. Embedded financial services

Another way to differentiate yourself is to offer your users more than remittance services. Think of other financial problems they need to solve, and then embed these solutions within the limitations of what your license permits. 

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An example of this is embedding virtual cards into your offering. This allows users to create cards from their remittance app and use them for subscription payments or to shop online. Doing this improves the stickiness of your product, and you go from being the app they open occasionally to send money back home to an app useful for their everyday lives. 

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Hyginus explains:

People in diaspora are looking for more convenience with financial services. For example, virtual cards are very important. So, you can give them that flexibility to create cards and other financial services. In other cases, you can build use cases that allow your users to pay utility bills. 

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Grace Maina, Sales and Partnerships Manager EA at Kora, elaborates:

I think we are seeing this today with the likes of NALA and Sendwave, where you can make a direct deposit for a utility payment, be it electricity or water. These are not your regular financial problems. There have been stories of people who send money back to their home country for years for a project, like building a home or buying a piece of land, and when they come back, they discover that the recipient misappropriated the funds. Users are asking for ways remittance companies can solve these problems.

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4. High-value and business remittances

Focus on powering remittances for high-value customers and businesses instead of retail customers. This is one way Cash Remit has stacked over $500 million in transaction volume since 2016. 

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Hyginus shares more insights:

A few customers of mine who run healthcare provider companies in Australia have 50% of their staff employed in Nigeria, and every month, they have to pay salaries. Instead of focusing on small ticket volumes, remittance companies can focus on these high-value businesses.

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Different industries require high-value remittance services. Real estate is one of them. 

Eric Wainana, General Manager (Africa), Conduit shares:

Move away from the traditional remittance space of I need to send 25 bucks back home to buy animal feed, and think about the high-value remittance. So folks, particularly in western countries, are looking towards certain things like real estate back home, or buying a house or securities. You can pivot your business to serve these use cases. 

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5. Diversify your infrastructure with stablecoins and alternative payment rails

Find ways to make your operations more efficient. This could mean adopting an alternative payment rail like stablecoins which depends on the country you’re operating from and whether you have regulators permission.

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Alternate payment rails reduce operating costs and provide an advantage in speed. Examples are global fintech companies like Stripe, Mastercard, and Visa.

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With regulatory challenges, Eric explains how remittance companies can take advantage of stablecoins within the boundaries of what your regulator permits:
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The stablecoin sandwich is essentially a piece of infrastructure that a traditional fintech company can use. It allows the stablecoin transaction to happen, but then they can continue to operate as it is legally deemed. So they are not getting involved in processing the stablecoin transactions. The stablecoin sandwich allows for the movement of value without necessarily having you, the fintech or you, the traditional player, to think about an exchange or liquidity pool.

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On how stablecoins will influence remittance and fintechs in the future, Eric shares what the future might look like: 

What stablecoin truly eliminates is a correspondent banking infrastructure that essentially leads to high fees and slow-paced movement of value because stablecoins allow for rapid movement of value across boundaries, countries and jurisdictions at a fraction of the cost.

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In addition, Eric explains how stablecoins are cheap for cross-border payments.

I recently did the math with someone who asked me about the cost of sending the equivalent of $1,000 from Nigeria into Ghana. The cost is between $25 and $80. On stablecoins, it's between $5 and $10 depending on which modality you will use.

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Eric also explains that a fintech can use stablecoins to protect itself from macroeconomic forces.

If you’re a fintech or building a fintech in Africa, you should be very well aware of the challenges from a regulatory and macroeconomic perspective, too. Having a chunk of your business, either receivables, payables or your operations in foreign currencies like the dollar, begins to make absolute sense. Stablecoins help you do that.

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Is the Remittance market in Africa saturated? 

With the influx of new entrants  in the remittance industry in Africa, should you still build a remittance company? 

Eric and Grace shared. 

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Eric: 

We’ve barely scratched the surface, and here's why. The flows that you are currently seeing are from the very traditional corridors: the USA, Canada, and Europe. But then, take an example of a market like Kenya, Saudi Arabia has essentially catapulted itself to the third-largest remittance source for the Kenyan market. 

The Gulf Cooperation Council region, which is essentially 4 hours away from any African capital, is now employing a substantial critical mass of young Africans in those markets, and they still face the same sort of circumstances and the same architecture of wanting to send value back home.

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Grace: 

The market is not saturated for sure. It's not about the number of startups in tech within the space, but also realising who our competition is. Today in Africa, our biggest competition is cash. Yes, we're recording hundreds of billions in remittances. Statistics also show that the informal remittances market is almost 30 to 40% more than we are recording formally, so the space is not yet saturated.

There's still a lot that can be done, from delivering transparency to delivering efficiency, even something as small as 24-hour support on your app. That is already an opportunity for any startup to pick up.

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Conclusion

If you’re building in the remittance space, you must move beyond competing on fees and rates and build for your customers’ pain points. 

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To thrive, understand that customers aren’t only looking for the cheapest way to send money, they're looking for partners who understand their complex financial lives. Whether it's the entrepreneur in Toronto who manages payroll for staff in Lagos, the professional in Berlin with real estate investments back home, or the family member who wants direct control over utility payments, modern remittance users need solutions beyond basic money transfer.

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So, differentiate through value, not just pricing. Speed builds trust. Convenience drives retention. Embedded services create stickiness. High-value focus improves margins. Alternative infrastructure reduces costs. And throughout it all, the human element of understanding your customers' real needs should be at the centre of your operations.