-- Oluwatomisin Ashimolowo, co-founder of Betaling Africa and a fintech partnership leader with eight years of experience managing cross-border payment volumes across Africa, Europe, and emerging markets, has published new analysis arguing that the finance industry has been directing African businesses toward the wrong metric when evaluating cross-border payment infrastructure.
His position is direct. Transaction fees are visible, quantifiable, and widely optimised for. But in his assessment, they are largely irrelevant compared to the hidden cost that actually determines business outcomes: settlement speed.
The Fee Illusion
Ashimolowo illustrates the argument with a scenario he describes as representative of a pattern he has observed consistently across his client base. A logistics company in Lagos initiates a wire transfer to pay a supplier in London on Monday morning. It clears Thursday afternoon. The fee is $40. What the fee does not capture is three days of idle inventory at $200 per day in warehouse costs, a delayed shipment, and a customer order lost to a competitor. In his assessment, the real cost of that payment is closer to $2,000.
The hidden costs he identifies beyond the visible fee include FX markups buried in exchange rates, correspondent banking fees accumulated through intermediary chains, working capital trapped in settlement float, operational overhead from finance teams tracking and reconciling payments, and FX volatility exposure during multi-day settlement windows.
"I'd rather pay 50 basis points more and have certainty that money arrives tomorrow than save 10 basis points and pray it clears by Friday," one of Ashimolowo's clients told him directly, a response he describes as the moment that changed how he thinks about the industry.
The Working Capital Argument
Ashimolowo introduces what he terms time-to-value as the metric he argues should replace fee comparison as the primary evaluation criterion. He defines it as the period between a payment leaving the sender's account and the moment the recipient can actually use those funds.
For businesses processing $1 million in weekly international payments with a three-day settlement window, he calculates that approximately $300,000 is permanently trapped in payment float. At a 5% cost of capital, that represents $15,000 in annual financing costs from settlement delays alone, before operational overhead is factored in.
He cites one client processing $2 million monthly across eight countries, whose finance team was spending approximately 15 hours per week tracking and reconciling payments. After moving to stablecoin settlement, that dropped to 10 minutes of automated reconciliation weekly. Ashimolowo calculates that at $50 per hour in loaded labour costs, the saving amounts to $36,000 annually for that single client.
The Case for Stablecoin Settlement
Ashimolowo argues that stablecoins, primarily USDT issued by Tether and USDC issued by Circle, with both of which Betaling Africa has built institutional partnerships, present a structural solution to the settlement speed problem rather than simply a cheaper alternative to traditional wire transfers.
Stablecoin transfers, in his description, settle in minutes rather than days. A payment sent at 10:05 AM is available to the recipient by 10:15 AM, regardless of banking hours, correspondent bank chains, or settlement windows.
His economic case is built around a comparison for a business processing $10 million annually in cross-border payments. Under traditional wire infrastructure with a three-day average settlement window, he calculates hidden costs of approximately $11,000 to $14,000 annually, comprising float financing costs, operational overhead, and FX risk premium. Stablecoin transaction fees for the same volume across 1,000 transactions would amount to $500 to $2,000. His conclusion is that even where stablecoin fees exceed traditional banking rates, the elimination of hidden settlement costs produces a positive return.
When Betaling Africa launched a stablecoin-powered payment channel in 2021, Ashimolowo reports that 30 percent of client volume had migrated to stablecoin settlement within three months. He attributes this not to lower pricing but to CFOs independently calculating the cash flow value of settlement certainty.
A Framework for Calculating Hidden Settlement Costs
Ashimolowo provides a four-step framework he recommends CFOs apply to quantify what slow settlement is actually costing their organisations. The steps are: calculate average monthly cross-border payment volume; divide by average days to settlement; multiply by cost of capital, typically three to seven percent; and add estimated operational overhead from finance team time spent tracking payments.
His broader argument is that payment strategy is inseparable from cash flow strategy, operational strategy, and competitive positioning. The companies he observed growing fastest at Betaling Africa, he states, were not those saving the most on transaction fees. They were those that had eliminated multi-day settlement delays entirely.
About Oluwatomisin Ashimolowo
Oluwatomisin Ashimolowo is the co-founder of Betaling Africa, which scaled to £150 million in annual transaction volume across 10 African markets. He has built institutional partnerships with Tether, Circle, and major African financial services companies, and currently advises fintech founders and payment platform operators on emerging market expansion strategy and cross-border payment infrastructure. He holds an MSc in International Business Management from the University of Hertfordshire and an MBA in Strategic Management from Africa International University. He is based in the UK. You can learn more about Oluwatomisin Ashimolowo and Betaling Africa through these articles in Technext24 and in Business Insider Africa.
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