Nomba’s new API lets fintechs pay out to 5 countries without the FX headache

For anyone who has tried to run a cross-border payments business from Nigeria, the frustration is familiar. You collect naira on one end, then scramble to source foreign currency through OTC markets while your customer waits.

Meanwhile, you are holding reserve positions on the payout side too. Capital is frozen in two places at once, and every transaction costs you more than the fee you charged for it.

Nomba, Nigeria’s business payments company, wants to change that.

The company launched its Global Payout API this week, a single integration that lets fintech entities and payment operators collect funds in naira or stablecoins and disburse directly to five international markets, the United Kingdom, Europe, Canada, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Nigeria, without manually managing foreign exchange or maintaining liquidity on both sides of the transaction.

The timing matters. Cross-border payments out of Africa remain one of the most expensive corridors in the world. The World Bank’s latest Remittance Prices Worldwide report puts the average cost of sending $200 from Sub-Saharan Africa at above 8%, more than double the UN Sustainable Development Goal target of 3%.

A significant chunk of that cost is not profit for operators. It is the friction of managing fragmented liquidity across multiple systems, and it is the exact problem Nomba is trying to remove.

Read also: Nomba acquires Canadian payment firm to build direct Africa-Canada trade rails

Nomba’s API

What the company calls the “dual liquidity trap” is the operational reality that has quietly limited how many Nigerian fintech entities can compete in cross-border payments at any meaningful scale.

You need naira to collect, you need dollars or pounds or euros to disburse, and the gap between those two states has historically required capital reserves that smaller operators simply cannot afford to sit on indefinitely.

The API collapses that into a single transaction flow. When funds land in a virtual account, whether in naira or in USDT and USDC stablecoins, the system converts instantly and initiates disbursement. Operators do not touch the foreign exchange process at all.

The stablecoin option is worth noting separately because it gives operators who want to remove naira exposure entirely a clean alternative, one that becomes more relevant every time the exchange rate moves sharply.

"Running a cross-border payments business from Nigeria has meant managing frozen liquidity on two fronts at the same time," Yinka Adewale, CEO of Nomba, said. "Operators collect naira, then go source foreign currency, all while their customers are waiting. We built this API to collapse that operational complexity into a single transaction flow."

The corridors the API covers reflect where Nigerian diaspora remittance and business payment volumes are actually concentrated.

UK payments move through Faster Payments at up to £1,000,000 per transaction, settling between one and three hours. Europe runs on SEPA at up to €100,000 with settlement in under an hour. Canada uses Interac for instant settlement alongside standard bank transfer. The DRC supports mobile money and bank transfer, both instant.

Yinka Adewale, CEO, Nomba

The five-minute exchange rate lock is the detail operators will care about most in practice. The rate shown at the point of initiation is the rate applied at settlement, eliminating slippage on volatile corridors and removing one of the most persistent sources of reconciliation disputes in cross-border operations.

Nigeria’s fintech sector processed an estimated $24 billion in payment transactions in 2024, with cross-border volumes growing faster than domestic payments.

The infrastructure gap between collection and disbursement has been one of the clearest structural limits on how quickly that growth converts into internationally competitive businesses. Nomba’s Global Payout API is available now, with documentation live.

Read also: Nomba launches Apple Pay for Nigerian merchants, enabling contactless payments

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