Mouloukou Sanoh, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of MANSA, tells NewsGhana why prefunding is the real enemy of African payments and how stablecoin liquidity is rewriting the rules.
The story of cross-border payments in Africa is usually told as a technology problem. The reality, according to Mouloukou Sanoh, is a liquidity problem, and the distinction matters enormously for the millions of people who depend on fast, affordable money transfers across the continent’s corridors.
Sanoh is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of MANSA, a Dubai-based fintech platform that provides stablecoin-backed liquidity to payment companies operating in emerging markets. Since launching in August 2024, MANSA has processed over $320 million in payments, recorded more than 500 percent growth, and attracted a $10 million seed round led by Tether, the world’s largest stablecoin issuer. Ghana and Nigeria are among its primary markets. NewsGhana asked Sanoh to explain how the model works and what it means for Africa’s financial infrastructure.
The prefunding trap
The core inefficiency MANSA was built to solve is prefunding. Payment companies serving African corridors must park capital in destination markets before a single transaction clears, locking up working capital across multiple countries, often for days. This is a structural tax that falls hardest on smaller operators with limited treasury capacity. On top of that, traditional banking routes force most transactions through the United States dollar, even when neither party wants dollars, adding currency conversion costs and settlement uncertainty to every transaction.
MANSA removes the prefunding requirement entirely. The company underwrites incoming capital at the sender’s location and simultaneously deploys a stablecoin liquidity facility at the recipient’s location, enabling instant payout without the operator having to preposition funds. “Capital on-ramped at Point A simultaneously repays MANSA on a back-to-back basis, creating a clean, capital-efficient closed loop characterised by zero trapped liquidity and true finality,” Sanoh explained.
Why Ghana and Nigeria lead adoption
Both markets have high remittance inflows, active fintech ecosystems, and regulators that have been relatively open to innovation. Ghana’s persistent Cedi volatility creates artificial constraints on payment operators trying to serve inbound corridors, while Nigeria’s currency environment has historically made dollar liquidity expensive to access through normal banking channels. MANSA’s instant settlement rail bypasses both bottlenecks. Payment companies in both markets have reported a 30 percent increase in transaction volumes after integrating with the platform, Sanoh said, suggesting the demand was already present but the infrastructure to serve it was not.
Tether’s role and the USDT bet
Tether led MANSA’s equity round and provided a revolving stablecoin credit facility alongside the investment. Sanoh said the relationship goes beyond signalling. The credit facility enables MANSA to finance significant annual run-rate volume, and each corridor financed further embeds stablecoins in real-world payment flows rather than speculative trading. MANSA builds on Tether’s USDT because of its accessibility, market reach, and dominance in emerging market on-chain transactions.
Risk management at scale
Automated liquidity controls adjust MANSA’s corridor limits in real time as market volatility shifts, so exposure contracts before it becomes a problem. Daily currency netting prevents open positions from carrying overnight across multiple markets simultaneously. Multi-layered wallet protections, continuous proof-of-reserves checks, and monthly audits underpin the security layer. On peak trading days, the platform has processed $1.2 million in throughput with no failed payouts.
What $320 million in volume reveals
The clearest pattern from MANSA’s processed volume is that converting funds into clean local currency at the destination, not the cross-border transfer itself, is the primary bottleneck. Corridors with the highest friction generate the strongest demand once liquidity constraints are removed. Stablecoin adoption in markets such as Brazil and Argentina reflects real businesses seeking faster settlement, not speculative investors. That trajectory, Sanoh argues, confirms the infrastructure gap is real and the market is ready for alternatives to correspondent banking.
Scaling at 500 percent
The hardest operational challenge at that growth rate is managing liquidity across an expanding number of corridors simultaneously. Every new market brings its own currency dynamics, banking relationships, regulatory requirements, and settlement quirks. Treasury management at scale is a real-time problem: enough liquidity must be deployed to meet demand, but idle capital is expensive. Finding people who understand both stablecoin infrastructure and emerging market payments has also been a constraint, forcing MANSA to build most of that expertise internally.
Correcting the dominant misconception
Sanoh closed with what he considers the most important correction to prevailing assumptions about Africa’s payment challenges. “The biggest misconception is that stablecoins reinforce dollar dominance. Our goal is the opposite: to enable seamless movement of money in and out of emerging markets at the best available price and speed. The stablecoin is the settlement mechanism, not the destination.” The second misconception, he said, is that Africa’s payment problems are primarily about technology. They are not. The technology exists. The constraint is liquidity, and payment companies across the continent are sophisticated, well-regulated operators being held back by infrastructure gaps, not technical ones.
