Spendin Opens Cross-Border Payment Infrastructure to African Fintechs With New Alpha API
Spendin Africa has launched the first version of its business-facing payment infrastructure, giving banks, fintech companies, remittance firms and mobile money operators a way to access its cross-border payment rails through a single API integration.
The fintech, which began its consumer journey less than a year ago, said Spendin Alpha API 1.0 is designed to make it easier for financial businesses to move money between African markets and connect those transactions to global payment networks.
The move marks a shift in Spendin’s strategy. Rather than focusing only on consumers using its app, the company is now opening parts of the infrastructure powering its payment services to other financial businesses.
Spendin Targets Africa’s Complicated Cross-Border Payment System
Moving money across African countries can be a headache for fintechs and other financial companies.
Different currencies, banking systems, mobile money networks, foreign exchange requirements and liquidity arrangements often mean that companies expanding into new markets have to work with several payment providers at once.
Spendin says its new API is intended to reduce that complexity.
Through one integration, businesses can initiate payouts to local bank accounts and mobile money wallets across supported markets. The infrastructure also supports settlement through USDT and naira, while providing access to liquidity without requiring companies to keep a prefunded balance with Spendin.
The platform handles areas such as foreign exchange, local payment processing and payout infrastructure behind the scenes.
It also includes features for managing the payment process, including transaction updates, retries and webhooks, allowing businesses to monitor and respond to transactions from their own systems.
Heritage Falodun: Companies Should Not Rebuild Payment Rails for Every Market
Spendin co-founder and Chief Operating Officer, Heritage Falodun, said the company developed the API after spending months operating its own payment infrastructure through its consumer product.
According to Falodun, the aim is to allow financial companies to enter additional African markets without having to start their payment infrastructure from scratch each time.
The company believes the experience gained from handling real transactions through its consumer platform gives it a practical foundation for offering those same capabilities to businesses.
Spendin said the Alpha API is only the beginning of its broader infrastructure plans.
Future versions are expected to cover areas including treasury, collections, disbursements and wallet infrastructure.
From Consumer App to Infrastructure Provider
Spendin’s latest move gives the company two increasingly connected sides.
Its consumer application is designed for people who want to move money across markets, use different currencies and access services such as stablecoin-based transactions.
The new API takes some of the infrastructure behind those experiences and makes it available to businesses.
That means a remittance company, for example, could potentially use Spendin’s rails for liquidity, foreign exchange and local payouts instead of building every part of that system independently.
The company has also been expanding the services available to consumers.
Recently introduced Payment Links and Invoice features are available to users in Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya and Ghana, giving customers additional ways to request or receive payments from merchants, businesses and other users.
The expansion suggests that Spendin is using activity on its consumer platform to identify payment problems that can later be addressed at the infrastructure level.
Why Spendin Is Being Compared With Revolut
Spendin has increasingly attracted comparisons with Revolut because of the direction of its product strategy.
Revolut started with services centred around foreign exchange and international spending before expanding into a wider financial platform.
Spendin is pursuing a similarly broad ambition, although from the perspective of African markets and their unique payment challenges.
In less than a year, the company says it has expanded its consumer reach across Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, Ghana, other African markets and the United States.
Its platform now covers areas including cross-border payments, multi-currency transactions, stablecoin settlement, local payouts and merchant-focused payment tools.
The comparison, however, is more about the direction of the business than its current size. Spendin remains a young fintech and has not reached anything close to Revolut’s global scale.
CEO Says Spendin Wants to Build More Than a Payment App
Spendin co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Timilehin Kayode, said the company’s long-term ambition extends beyond providing another consumer payment application.
The company wants to build infrastructure capable of handling the difficult parts of moving money between markets while making the experience simpler for the businesses and consumers using it.
For African fintechs, that could become increasingly important as companies look beyond their home countries and attempt to serve customers across multiple markets.
What the Alpha API Means for Spendin’s Next Stage
The launch of Spendin Alpha API 1.0 represents an important change in how the company is positioning itself.
It started by building a financial product for consumers, but it is now attempting to turn the underlying payment infrastructure into a service that other financial companies can build on.
With African markets still dealing with fragmented payment systems, currencies and liquidity networks, the opportunity is significant if Spendin can make those connections reliable and easy for businesses to use.
For now, the Alpha API is an early step. But it signals that Spendin is no longer looking only at how individuals move money across Africa. It also wants to play a role in how financial companies themselves move money across the continent and beyond.
