Flutterwave, one of Africa’s largest payments companies, is partnering with Tempo to expand stablecoin settlement options to cross-border payments across the continent.
Flutterwave connects businesses and individuals to local and cross-border payments across 34 African markets. Its Send App moves money from the diaspora in the US, UK, EU, and Canada to recipients across Africa, and Flutterwave for Business powers enterprise cross-border payments and supplier settlements.
The cost of moving money across Africa
Moving money into and across the continent is still slow and expensive. Remittance fees to sub-Saharan Africa average around 7 percent, above the global average and well above the United Nations target of 3 percent. The cost comes from a chain of correspondent banks and foreign exchange conversions, and that same chain can hold settlement for several business days. For businesses, that ties up working capital. For families, it means less money arriving, and a longer wait for it.
What Flutterwave is building with Tempo
Flutterwave is integrating Tempo as a settlement network across the Send App and Flutterwave for Business, as part of a move toward multi-rail payments infrastructure. Once live, the integration will support wallet-to-wallet stablecoin payments, with the option to settle across corridors in seconds rather than days, at predictable cost. Rather than routing every payment through a single path, Flutterwave will be able to support interoperability across corridors based on specific corridor requirements and customer preferences, complementing its existing blockchain settlement infrastructure.
Why Tempo
Tempo is a blockchain built for payments, incubated by Stripe and Paradigm. For a platform operating at Flutterwave’s scale, two things matter most: fast, deterministic finality, so settlement is certain, and fixed, predictable fees, so cost can be forecast across millions of payments. Structured payments metadata lets transfers carry the identifiers finance teams need to reconcile against their existing systems.
Our partnership with Tempo allows us to expand our existing payments ecosystem by adding additional practical stablecoin settlement rails. We are working together to turn these into everyday tools that will make cross-border payments faster, more predictable, and more cost-efficient for businesses and individuals across Africa
— Olugbenga “GB” Agboola, Founder & CEO, Flutterwave
What’s next
Flutterwave and Tempo are working to move the integration into production. We will share more as corridors go live.
If you are a payments platform or fintech evaluating stablecoins for cross-border settlement, get in touch.
