Nomba acquires Canadian payment firm to build direct Africa-Canada trade rails

African fintech Nomba has acquired a licenced Payment Service Provider and Money Services Business in Canada, establishing a regulated infrastructure to facilitate business-to-business payments between African companies and Canadian counterparts.

The acquisition, completed in Q2 2025, gives Nomba on-the-ground regulatory coverage in Canada, allowing the company to move money locally within the country and connect Canadian dollar flows directly to African markets.

The company has injected approximately $2 million in capital into the acquired entity to strengthen infrastructure and scale operations.

Unlike most cross-border payment platforms serving Africa, which focus on consumer remittances, Nomba’s Canada expansion targets trade-related flows, as explained by the company.

The company’s customers include exporters, importers, professional services firms, and multinational suppliers operating between Africa and North America. These are sectors where African businesses already trade extensively with Canada across oil and gas services, commodities, FMCG imports, and technology.

The infrastructure enables African businesses to hold local CAD accounts in Canada, receive direct settlement from CAD into Nigerian naira and other African currencies, and process cross-border payments in near-real-time with reduced reliance on intermediary banks.

Nomba claims the system delivers foreign exchange and transaction cost reductions of up to 40-60 per cent compared to traditional correspondent banking networks.

“Cross-border trade payments for African businesses are still built on infrastructure that was never designed for speed or transparency,” said Yinka Adewale, CEO of Nomba. “Owning regulated infrastructure allows us to remove layers of complexity and give businesses predictable, reliable rails they can build on.”

The company processed $3.4 million through its Canadian infrastructure in January 2026 alone. One early customer, a Nigerian oil and gas services company billing Canadian counterparties on a recurring basis, previously experienced three-to-five business day settlement times through correspondent banks with opaque exchange rates and manual reconciliation. Using Nomba’s infrastructure, the company now operates a dedicated CAD account with same-day settlement.

“For businesses, reliability matters more than novelty,” Adewale said. “They want payments to settle when expected and funds to be usable immediately. That’s what owning the rails makes possible.”

Nomba’s new Canadian venture to serve DR Congo expansion

The Canadian acquisition is strategically linked to Nomba’s recent expansion into the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

In November 2024, the company went live in the DRC after spending a year building agent networks in Kinshasa. Nomba has since secured regulatory approval for international money transfers in the DRC, creating what the company describes as a strategic control point for cross-border B2B payments across Francophone and Anglophone Africa.

The DRC represents one of Africa’s largest untapped trade economies, rich in minerals and commodities that Canadian firms actively source. By owning regulatory licences and infrastructure on both ends (Canada and the DRC) Nomba can now offer local-currency accounts, transparent pricing, and same-day settlement to businesses in both markets that have historically faced fragmented payment rails and settlement delays of up to a week.

“Now that we’ve demonstrated consistent same-day settlement and rock-solid reliability, we’re opening access more broadly,” Adewale said. “From a regulatory standpoint, all FX operations run through our Canadian entity, which means businesses are accessing fully licenced, compliant cross-border banking infrastructure.”

Nomba says the Canada corridor is the first of several international markets where it plans to establish regulated infrastructure to support African trade. The company claims to already process trillions of naira annually across payments, banking, and cross-border flows in Africa.

“Africa to Canada is live,” Adewale said. “Africa to the rest of the world is next.“

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