One major frustration that comes with travelling as an African is having money and being unable to use it. Your card works at home but fails when you enter another country. A payment method everyone uses there requires a new registration; you have to download another app, get another card or find another way to move your money just to pay for something.
For years, Africans have learned to work around this. Before travelling, you might get a dollar card, download another app or ask someone which payment method works at your destination. By the time you return home, you may have collected enough cards and financial apps to make it seem like travelling comes with a separate financial identity.
For Timon co-founders Tomi Ayorinde and Chizaram Ucheaga, that experience was familiar. Both encountered different versions of the same problem for many years. And so, after experiencing it repeatedly over a decade, they decided to build for that gap.
From a card that works abroad to something bigger
Africa’s fintech boom has solved many problems around moving money. Sending and receiving money across borders is easier than it once was, and digital financial services have become a regular part of everyday life. But Ayorinde says much of that infrastructure is still built around individual markets.
He describes the kind of life that is becoming common for many Africans: someone earns in dollars, lives in Nigeria, travels to Kenya and pays in shillings, then heads to the UK and needs access to that same money there. The person moves; their money does, technically, but the financial products they rely on often don’t.
“You can end up switching between different cards, banking apps, wallets, currencies and payment methods depending on where you are,” he says.
That is where Timon began. The founders wanted to build what they describe as a financial product that travels with its user. The idea was not simply to give someone another card for international payments, but to reduce the number of things they have to figure out when they move between countries.
“If you’re moving from Lagos to Nairobi, London or anywhere else, you shouldn’t have to start figuring out how to access and spend your money all over again each time you arrive somewhere new,” Ayorinde says.
The platform’s earliest version focused on the more immediate problem of helping Africans access and spend their money when travelling.
But as the founders built the product and watched how people used it, they realised the difficulty did not begin and end with payments. A card is only useful for one part of the journey. There is still the question of holding different currencies, moving money between countries, and sometimes simply getting connected when you arrive.
Today, Timon brings together multi-currency wallets, virtual and physical cards, cross-border transfers, US dollar accounts, local payment options and eSIMs. The company is also working on additional services, including flight bookings.
“The product has expanded, but the underlying idea hasn’t really changed,” Ucheaga says. “We want people to be able to move between markets without having to piece together a different set of financial products and services every time they travel.”
How Timon works
A Timon user can fund their wallet with local currency, US dollars, or stablecoins and use the funds for various services on the platform.
Someone travelling from Nigeria, for example, could fund their wallet before leaving, hold money in dollars and use their Timon card to pay in Kenya or the UK. They can also move money across countries without having to sign up for a different financial product each time.
“Imagine not having to register to use M-Pesa when you’re in Kenya,” Ucheaga says.
However, every market has its own banking relationships, payment systems, currencies, regulations and ways people pay for things. Timon doesn’t attempt to build all of that infrastructure itself. It works with banks, payment networks, local payment partners and other providers while building the technology that connects those different systems.
A payment that feels like a simple tap of a card can involve payment processing, currency conversion, compliance and local settlement across different providers. The user’s job, according to the founders, shouldn’t be to know any of that.
“Our job is to connect those different pieces in a way that works reliably across markets and make as much of that complexity as possible invisible to the user,” Ayorinde says.
Timon says it now has more than 100,000 users across 16 African countries and has processed approximately $50 million in transaction volume. Most of its revenue currently comes from payments and transaction activity, alongside service fees and revenue-sharing arrangements with its partners.
Its target users are mainly remote workers paid by companies abroad, entrepreneurs doing business in different markets, professionals who travel frequently and Africans whose financial lives no longer fit neatly into one country.
“Our advantage is that we’re building around the broader experience of financial mobility rather than solving for a single transaction or market,” Ayorinde says.
Whether that ambition can translate into a product Africans use as naturally across borders as they do at home will depend on how well Timon can continue to navigate the complexity it is trying to hide. The company is still a relatively small player trying to solve a complicated problem.
