I meet Rodney Jackson-Cole at an event organised by Google for Startups. We sit down to talk, and the Bani Co-founder and CEO tells me, “We are on a mission to one day handle 80% of all commerce in Africa.”
It is an enormous claim for a company four years old and $250,000 into its life. He delivers it with the excitement of someone describing next quarter’s roadmap.
Before Bani, Jackson-Cole was CTO and Co-founder of Propsa, a Y Combinator-backed business banking startup that raised $3.8 million in pre-seed. Although he started his career in research and development at Finn Lab, Jackson-Cole later moved to Nestbank, where he was Director and CTO. Maybe his solid background explains why he is confident about what Bani can achieve.
A 2025 report by Oui Capital estimates that Africa’s cross-border payments market is worth $329 billion in 2025, and is projected to reach $1 trillion by 2035, with a 12% compound annual growth rate (CAGR). Jackson-Cole says he is building toward that trillion with his pan-African financial technology startup, Bani, by developing cross-border payment infrastructure that helps African businesses trade, make, and receive payments, and eliminate settlement delays.
Cross-border payments between African countries have remained a pressing issue. When a business in Nigeria intends to make payments to a merchant in another African country, say, Sierra Leone, the process is usually cumbersome. First, it has to be routed through a correspondent bank in Europe or America, where fees (the average cost of cross-border payments from Africa to the world is 7.1%, while the global average is about 2.8%) are deducted. Then it takes about three to seven business days for the merchant to receive the payment.
Payments in Africa operate in silos. The payment environment is completely different when you move from Ghana to Kenya, then to South Africa, and to Liberia. Each of these environments has its own unique payment ecosystem, compliance, and regulations.
“Goods move faster than money on this continent,” he says. “A container can get from Mombasa to Lagos before the payment for it clears. Every day the money is in transit is a day of stock not ordered, staff not paid, and deals lost. We built Bani because that wait is not a law of nature. It is just old plumbing.”
Jackson-Cole has first-hand experience of this during his time at the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration. He built a website for his client in Nigeria, who used the same bank as he did, but his client had to first convert naira to USD, use the bank’s transfer rate, and incur multiple fees before he could make payment.
Solving Africa’s cross-border payment challenge
Jackson-Cole says Bani wants to unify cross-border payments in Africa, and his startup has a unique approach that it is working with.
“There is a three-step strategy that we have,” he says, “in any market, we first look at who are the biggest players. In Nigeria, banks are the biggest players; Senegal has mobile money/wallet services; Sierra Leone has mobile money.”
Bani’s strategy involves directly approaching the biggest players (banks, mobile money operators, or wallets) in any local market, negotiating with them, and getting them to authorise the startup to build integrations to their APIs to enable collections and payouts.
Next is to build tools such as APIs, dashboards, and mobile apps that make it easy for merchants to use Bani’s services. After all the aforementioned is done, it then proceeds to acquire merchants. The startup’s value proposition to merchants is one account, one API. Once a merchant has done compliance with Bani, they don’t have to worry about anything else.
Established players like Flutterwave, Onafriq, Cellulant, Verto, and others appear to have a head start in the space Bani is building in, but Jackson-Cole argues that his startup’s focus is slightly different.
“Onafriq and Cellulant aggregate intra-Africa mobile money. Flutterwave is a broad card and bank processor. Verto is B2B FX on correspondent banking, focused on USD/GBP/EUR,” he says, explaining that Bani’s model is to identify where consumers hold value in each local market they operate in and build deep integrations with financial players.
Jackson-Cole adds that Bani doesn’t process cards or use third-party integrations, which has allowed it to negotiate better rates and build direct partnerships with banks and mobile money operators.
“With this infrastructure, our focus is trade settlement for the Africa-to-Asia corridor, which none of them serve deeply,” Jackson Cole notes. “We use stablecoins to move value and settle in local currencies. And about 85% of our merchants come through the cooperative channel at zero customer acquisition cost (CAC), a playbook we are replicating across Francophone West Africa.”
The startup charges a percentage on transaction fees, which varies by region and merchant, plus a small foreign exchange (FX) markup fee. On treasury, Jackson-Cole says Bani holds working stablecoin float with over-the-counter (OTC) partners on the delivery side, collects NGN through bank partners, and converts on a rolling basis, netting internally where corridor flows overlap.
“We do not pre-fund delivery markets at a material scale; liquidity is sourced on demand against collected funds,” Jackson-Cole clarifies.
The difficult part, according to Jackson-Cole, is building integration with the providers to get them on board. However, he says his approach is very meticulous, involving financial clarity—he examines which regions are performing better before going in.
Jackson-Cole recounts a near-failure experience Bani had during the 2024 funding winter, when the startup almost ran out of runway. The team had to drive harder for revenue and ideas. One lifeline Bani had was that it built directly with banks (about six or seven in Nigeria); they had conversations with the banks and renegotiated reduced rates, and by the end of the year, the startup was profitable.
“We would not have survived without this approach,” Jackson-Cole says, noting that the heavy lifting was done in the first two years, and now, it’s time to focus on growth and expansion. He maintains that Bani remains profitable today and isn’t planning on raising additional funding any time soon.
I ask what Jackson-Cole’s approach would be should the banks (with which he’s built direct integrations) decide to pull the plug; he gives a somewhat evasive answer, insisting that his focus is on building value for his partners.
“Banks will always be banks; we are able to move in markets and do things that might be limiting based on their reach and regulations. That’s the value we bring to our financial partners, and we will continue to build on this,” he says.
Journey so far and challenges
Jackson-Cole notes that when Bani launched in 2022, it raised $250,000 in seed funding from Microtraction and another foreign firm. He says they could have raised way more money, but the initial plan was to figure things out and then return.
In 2026, Jackson-Cole says Bani has processed $100 million in Total Traded Volume (TTV), averaging $75,000-$100,000 per merchant. Since the figure is for 2026, this suggests a merchant count in the region of 1,000-1,000–1,333.
According to the company, customers save up to 25% on cross-border transaction fees compared with traditional banks. Jackson-Cole credits direct bank integrations for this.
For Jackson-Cole, compliance is one of the biggest things that keeps him up at night.
“The tech side of the business” is easy, he says, “the operational, regulatory and compliance” part is hard. Government agencies can come knocking on your door months after you’ve processed a transaction.
He views compliance as a money problem because you have to acquire the right licences. However, he is quick to state that caution is important.
“Be careful with the kind of merchants you build upon, and ensure they do exactly what they claim they’re doing,” stressing that compliance and regulations should be a safe process for both the operators and the customers.
Africa-Asia trade corridor
For Jackson-Cole, the Africa-Asia trade corridor is a ‘delicious opportunity’, and there is about $400 billion in the Africa-Asia trade corridor.
“Nigeria does a lot of trade with China,” Jackson-Cole says. “There’s so much value exchange between naira and yuan, but Chinese companies are the biggest players in that space,” reiterating that it’s an opportunity he wants to go after.
Jackson-Cole sees significant potential in that niche and aims to solve the problems people already face there, hoping to capture a slice of the billion-dollar market. He says he’s not afraid of the big players already operating there and that one person cannot solve it all.
Next phase for Bani
Asked whether the solution his startup provides would age well, Jackson-Cole gives an emphatic yes. He believes it will take a long while for the bottlenecks in cross-border payments in Africa and the Africa-Asia corridor to be finally solved.
Bani’s ambition is to one day control 80% of all commerce across Africa, and Jackson-Cole is building towards it, starting with connecting systems. He says opening Africa up, achieving full integration across all the countries, will ease cross-border trade. Jackson-Cole says this will eventually happen, and it’s just a matter of time.
