Esca Finance, a Nigerian-founded B2B foreign exchange (FX) sourcing, currency hedging, and corporate treasury management platform, has officially partnered with liquidity infrastructure provider MANSA to offer same-day payment processing across major African markets, including Nigeria, Ghana, and Francophone Africa.
MANSA, backed heavily by Tether (the creators of USDT) and operating on Coinbase’s Layer-2 network (called Base), had raised $10 million in seed financing, consisting of $3 million in equity (pre-seed) funding led by Tether and $7 million in liquidity/debt funding from institutional investors. The Tether-backed financing is aimed at solving liquidity shortages for payment companies.
In fact, MANSA was recently named in The Payments Power 50—a prominent annual global ranking and industry guide that recognises the most influential, innovative, and powerful companies and personalities shaping the financial technology and payments ecosystem. The company was named for their work using stablecoin tech to solve these exact cross-border pre-funding challenges.
The benchmark for inclusion is how effectively a company improves merchant approval rates, lowers transaction failure, reduces compliance friction, and secures the movement of capital across global corridors.
The Esca Finance-MANSA partnership gives cross-border payment companies the ability to complete transactions faster without their capital being trapped across multiple markets. It allows Esca Finance to tap into MANSA’s on-chain liquidity pools to provide same-day payment settlements for businesses moving capital across key corridors, including Nigeria, Ghana, and Francophone West and Central Africa.
Esca Finance's customers will be able to carryout cross-border transactions in Nigerian Naira (NGN) Ghanaian Cedis, XAF, and XOF. Esca, which processes between $75 million and $120 million in monthly transaction volume, stated that transactions routed through MANSA’s infrastructure are expected to account for 10%–20% of its monthly payment volume over the next 12 months.
The Dead Capital Trap in Cross-Border Payments
The necessity of pre-funding cross-border transactions is one of the most punitive bottlenecks in African enterprise finance. The mechanics of moving business capital across African borders without delays requires a practice known as pre-funding—a remittance model that requires payment operators to manually deposit and tie up massive volumes of local fiat currencies (such as Naira, Cedis, or CFA Francs) in local destination banks ahead of time to clear transactions immediately.
This remittance model is what regional fintech companies have relied on for decades to circumvent the delays of traditional banking rails that usually take anywhere from three to five business days due to legacy correspondent banking networks.
However, this model creates a severe liquidity drain for mid-market enterprises and growing startups. Millions of dollars in working capital sit idle and "trapped" in various bank accounts across the continent just to keep payment channels open. In a high-inflation, high-interest-rate environment, this dead capital actively erodes business growth.
How the On-Chain Integration Solves the Bottleneck
The collaboration between Esca Finance and MANSA completely bypasses this legacy dependency by moving transaction settlement on-chain. According to Esca Finance, MANSA’s infrastructure provides liquidity when transactions are initiated—meaning the infrastructure acts as a bridge that offers cross-border payment companies access to stablecoin liquidity pools backed by institutional providers like Tether.
Cross-border payment companies can now utilise MANSA’s APIs to access instant on-chain credit and settlement infrastructure to settle payments without the need to hold large capital in multiple countries. The transactions are routed via stablecoins (USDT) on high-speed, low-cost blockchain networks and converted seamlessly back into local fiat currencies at the destination point.
For Esca's corporate clients, the benefits are immediate. Businesses can access same-day, secure payouts at exchange rates that sit up to 3% more favourable than traditional market alternatives. More importantly, it unlocks corporate treasuries, allowing companies to keep their working capital fully deployed inside their core operations rather than resting in operational clearing accounts.
The Real Rise of B2B Crypto in Africa
The Esca Finance-MANSA partnership is not the first to offer stablecoins as a faster means of settlement to cross-border payment companies seeking alternatives to mainstream correspondent banking systems. Unlike NALA—a Tanzanian IMTO that secured a $50 million credit financing from private credit firm Liquidity to pre-fund cross-border payments across more payment corridors, Tether backs LemFi to promote stablecoin-powered remittance solutions across emerging markets.
These investment are part of Tether's plans to eliminate the differences between traditional finance (TradFi)—otherwise known as centralized banking—and digital finance—often specialized as decentralized finance (DeFi)—using blockchain technology. USDT (USD₮) is the world’s largest stablecoin by market capitalization and one of the most widely used digital dollars in the crypto industry. Tether is using USD₮ to bridge the gap so that digital assets can be more stable to become a liquid digital payment solution.
For years, the mainstream narrative surrounding cryptocurrency in Africa focused almost exclusively on retail speculation, peer-to-peer (P2P) trading, and micro-remittances. However, as global regulators and local macroeconomic pressures mount, the real utility of digital assets has pivoted firmly toward the enterprise layer.
The Esca and MANSA partnership provides a clear blueprint for the future of B2B fintech on the continent. By abstracting the complexity of the blockchain and offering it as a frictionless treasury utility, these platforms are demonstrating that stablecoins are no longer just an alternative asset class—they are fast becoming the foundational plumbing for modern African corporate trade.
As cross-border commercial activity continues to accelerate under frameworks like the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), the demand for instant, capital-efficient liquidity will only grow. Fintechs that successfully replace legacy pre-funding models with on-chain efficiency are poised to lead the next generation of African enterprise infrastructure.
Esca Finance was founded by Shalom Osiadi in 2023 to provide foreign exchange (FX) and currency-hedging infrastructure for businesses in emerging markets. The company later broaden its expansion focus across the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA). As of 2026, Esca Finance said it is already live through partner rails in several African countries, including Rwanda, Malawi, Egypt, Zambia, Kenya, Mauritius, Ethiopia, Uganda, Burundi, Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Comoros.
The company also plans to expand into more markets, including Djibouti and Seychelles. In addition to that, the Esca Finance and MANSA partnership is planned to expand to more African markets as Esca grows its network and MANSA adds new settlement corridors. But for now, the instant, same-day African payout settlements will be integrated into markets where both companies already operate.
