African businesses continue to face higher costs and longer settlement times when moving money across borders, often relying on multiple providers to complete a single transaction. Lumepay has entered the market with a platform that brings foreign exchange, liquidity management, collections, disbursements and settlement into one licensed environment for small and medium-sized businesses, corporations and financial institutions operating internationally.
Cross border payments are becoming a larger part of global commerce, with transaction volumes projected to exceed US$300 trillion by 2030. Yet companies across Africa still encounter obstacles including limited foreign exchange liquidity, payment routes that depend on multiple intermediaries and transactions delayed or rejected because of perceived jurisdictional risk. Those constraints reduce access to currencies such as the U.S. dollar, pound sterling and euro while increasing exchange rate costs and settlement times.
Rather than addressing individual parts of the payment process, Lumepay connects the full transaction lifecycle within a single platform. The company said the approach reduces operational fragmentation while improving capital efficiency, settlement certainty and processing speed.
The platform includes direct local payment rails for African currencies including the Kenyan shilling (KES), Nigerian naira (NGN) and Ghanaian cedi (GHS), addressing a gap left by many global payment processors that cannot settle natively in those currencies. It also provides API based integrations that support live pricing, automated collections and payouts, and transaction visibility throughout the payment process.
The service targets a range of cross border use cases. Exporters can collect payments in the expected currency without extended delays, businesses can settle supplier invoices in foreign currencies, merchants can process bulk payments across multiple countries, and South African companies can move funds from other African markets back into the South African rand.
The platform is already processing transactions under its existing licenses, according to the company.
“Lumepay has made receiving cross-border payments genuinely efficient and reliable. Our cashflow has improved and our operations run more smoothly. They have given us the confidence to expand our services into new African markets," said Martin, CEO at a corporate travel company.
Businesses and individuals using the platform can create multi-currency wallets to send, receive and exchange funds across more than 20 currencies. Lumepay said its all-in foreign exchange fees are transparent and can be up to 40% lower than market rates.
