Building Trust Across Borders: How Oneremit Is Giving African SMEs a Fair Path into Global Commerce

Cross-border business payments across African markets have long been slowed by delays, fragmented channels, and inconsistent access to foreign currency, creating obstacles for firms that depend on predictable settlement. These constraints often force smaller businesses without the resources for global operations to use informal systems or multi-step workarounds that make international trade costly, slow, and difficult to scale.

However, a new wave of founders and operators is building the infrastructure needed to move African SMEs into fully formal global commerce through several major trade corridors.

Oneremit is one of the companies leading that shift, created by Toronto-based founder Hammed Afenifere Adewumi to simplify how African businesses send and receive money across borders. The platform combines regulated foundations with stablecoin-powered settlement, all in an attempt to help African businesses make international payments in a matter of seconds while helping set them up for a multi-currency future.

Addressing The African Payment Infrastructure

Oneremit emerged from the prescient challenge that comes with sending money internationally in a quick, compliant, and transparent manner, with the specific requirements and expectations of Western financial systems. This is a particularly dire problem in Africa, where SMEs make up roughly 95% of registered firms yet face a fractured payment infrastructure, with payments taking an average of 3-5 business days to settle, significantly longer than same-day settlements common in developed markets.

The path of the company's founder, Hammed Afenifere, allowed him to see this discrepancy directly. He spent his early career days watching payment flows through a bureau-de-change role, followed by community-driven investment activity among Africans living abroad, and the combination of the two roles gave him direct insight into how global money movement can be correlated to global migration.

This is what he's seeking to address with Oneremit. The structure he's been building aims to give African SMEs access to partners in Canada, the U.S., and Europe while grounding operations in regions like Nigeria and Ghana, where many businesses already use (or would benefit from) a cross-border commerce platform.

How Oneremit Works

Oneremit's system covers a range of outbound needs, from supplier payments to tuition transfers, across corridors that legacy institutions often deprioritise.

When a business initiates a transfer, Oneremit receives the local currency, converts it within its regulated framework, and routes it through its partners in Canada or the United States before delivering it to the receiver's account. The process removes the need for users to source foreign currency themselves or navigate informal markets, replacing those steps with a single streamlined flow. Payments that once required days of coordination and multiple intermediaries now move through a unified channel that can complete the entire cycle in minutes.

Afenifere and his team worked heavily to make sure Oneremit remained compliant, both in its internal operations and in how they could educate the businesses the platform would help. With licences and registrations across Canada and the United States, the platform works to make sure African businesses using the platform can learn how to meet specific Western expectations on the quality and accuracy of digital transaction records and histories, as well as structured internal documentation.

By pairing regulatory clarity with cultural familiarity, this model would essentially reduce friction for partners abroad while helping local businesses present themselves in ways global institutions recognise.

Markers For Early Growth

Since receiving its Canadian MSB licence in August 2024 and beginning full operations nearly half a year later, Oneremit reports it has moved more than $50 million in transactions across its active corridors. The company's early months showed consistent month-on-month growth as demand for faster, compliant cross-border settlement became evident among African businesses.

Oneremit now serves more than 800 users and roughly 50 business clients, with volumes often moving through stablecoin rails (digital assets that attach their value to traditional currencies) to make sure each transaction is done quickly, even when conventional channels are slow. This framework has helped the company support sectors ranging from travel to import-export without relying on volatile or informal pathways.

Despite its ongoing growth, Afenifere points out one of the strongest product-market fits has appeared in rural and underbanked regions, places with notoriously limited access to banks and foreign-currency services. In these areas, users that previously had to deal with lengthy travel times for a transaction to be processed or multiple conversion steps can use Oneremit's system to get the predictability needed for everyday commercial activity.

Redefining Global African Commerce

Oneremit is preparing its next phase of expansion by developing multi-currency wallets supported by stablecoin infrastructure, expected to roll out in 2026. Users could use these wallets to hold and move foreign currencies such as USD, CAD, and EUR without moving them through traditional banks.

With this system, a business paying a supplier in Canada could exchange naira directly into Canadian dollars rather than passing through several intermediary currencies. The company would manage the complexity of routing and liquidity in the background, while the user sees only a straightforward conversion path. This, in turn, would simplify cross-border participation for smaller businesses and would fit a broader movement across emerging markets where stablecoins are becoming an accessible method for global financial inclusion.

Taken together, Hammed Afenifere's efforts point to a future in which African businesses can quickly and easily join and participate in global trade without facing the typical challenges in infrastructure and speed that, to this day, plague the sector. As the continent's commercial networks continue integrating with international markets, Oneremit stands positioned to help guide that transition.