Maplerad crosses $500M in transactions

Maplerad has processed more than $500 million (Ksh.65 billion) in transactions, a milestone that its founder says validates the growing demand for African-built financial infrastructure capable of supporting cross-border payments and digital financial services across the continent.

The fintech firm, which began as Wirepay in 2020 before evolving into Maplerad, has expanded from a payments startup into a financial infrastructure platform providing application programming interfaces (APIs) for payments, collections, virtual bank accounts, card issuing, foreign exchange and stablecoin on/off ramps. The services are now used by thousands of fintechs and businesses operating across Africa.

Co-founder Obinna Chukwujioke said the company's biggest breakthrough came when large enterprises began replacing their internally developed treasury systems with Maplerad's infrastructure.

"The realization that Maplerad was solving a permanent, structural problem, rather than a transient one, came when our transaction volume crossed the $100 million mark, driven heavily by enterprise demand rather than retail spikes," Chukwujioke said.

He noted that the $500 million milestone demonstrated that African businesses were seeking modern financial infrastructure rather than waiting for traditional banks to modernise their systems.

"We weren't just processing volume; we were defining market availability. When we reached the $500 million milestone, it proved that the market wasn't waiting for legacy banks to upgrade. They required a natively built, programmable financial internet layer," he said.

According to Chukwujioke, Africa's fragmented regulatory environment, volatile currencies and correspondent banking bottlenecks have made cross-border payments one of the continent's toughest infrastructure challenges. Rather than viewing those obstacles as purely financial, the company approached them as engineering problems.

"Currency volatility combined with correspondent banking friction has historically been the most capital-intensive to manage. However, we didn't view this as a financial cost, but as an engineering problem," he said.

To address the challenge, Maplerad developed what it calls an Automated Liquidity and Routing Engine (ALRE), which dynamically routes transactions through local liquidity pools, digital assets and institutional market makers instead of relying on a single banking channel.

The system also uses real-time analytics to anticipate liquidity shortages and currency fluctuations before they disrupt settlements.

Chukwujioke said the company's experience contrasts with several international payment firms that have struggled to establish sustainable operations in Africa.

"Global players failed or scaled back in Africa because they attempted to lift-and-shift a Western financial stack into a completely different operational reality. They relied on rigid, centralised ledgers and assumed uniform regulatory and technical infrastructure," he said.

Maplerad instead built direct integrations with central payment switches and clearing banks while designing its core ledger to continue processing transactions even when banking nodes or payment switches experience outages.

The architecture queues and reconciles transactions in the background, reducing failed payments for customers.

The company has also introduced Roam, a platform offering US dollar bank accounts, stablecoin wallets and instant transfers between the United States and African markets. Chukwujioke said the product was designed to bridge traditional banking systems and blockchain networks without exposing users to settlement delays.

"The seamless user experience of Roam belies an incredibly sophisticated multi-ledger orchestration engine beneath the surface. The hardest architectural hurdle to solve was the reconciliation and settlement latency between traditional banking ledgers and public blockchains," he said.

He explained that Maplerad uses an asynchronous settlement model supported by pre-funded liquidity pools, enabling users to receive funds almost instantly while banking and blockchain settlements are completed in the background.

As the company's infrastructure becomes more widely adopted, Chukwujioke said reliability and trust have become as important as innovation.

"When your infrastructure becomes fundamental to the survival of thousands of businesses and their end-users, your responsibility ceases to be purely technical; it becomes economic and institutional. We do not view ourselves merely as a software provider, but as custodians of trust within the ecosystem," he said.

To safeguard the ecosystem, the company has embedded compliance, transaction monitoring and anti-fraud controls directly into its APIs, ensuring clients cannot bypass regulatory safeguards while maintaining high system availability to minimise disruptions.

Beyond the business, Chukwujioke mentors entrepreneurs through the Lagos State Employment Trust Fund's Innovates Idea Hub, Junior Chamber International and the Alchemist Accelerator in the United States, where he advocates for stronger financial infrastructure to support Africa's growing digital economy.