For most African businesses, paying an overseas supplier remains a cumbersome process involving wire transfers, currency conversions, and days of waiting before an invoice clears. For Nigerian businesses in particular, persistent foreign exchange shortages and naira volatility have made dollar-denominated supplier payments even harder to execute reliably. CLEA, a Lagos-based, stablecoin-powered cross-border payments platform, believes it has found a way to simplify this longstanding challenge.

The company has launched Vendor Payments, a new feature that allows business customers to pay international suppliers, vehicle auction platforms, and shipping companies directly from their CLEA accounts without initiating a separate transfer outside the platform.

The rollout comes six months after the startup emerged from stealth in December 2025. During that period, the company reports having processed more than $20 million in transaction volume. Vendor Payments, which has been operating in a pilot phase, has already been adopted by over 50 businesses — an early indication that supplier payments are a pain point CLEA's existing customer base wants addressed.

The feature works by having customers select a supported vendor, enter a payment reference such as a buyer number, lot number, or invoice number, and authorize the transaction. Because vendor information is preconfigured on the platform, CLEA states that payments complete instantly rather than remaining in the multi-day limbo typical of traditional cross-border transfers.

Vehicle auction platforms Copart and IAA are among the first vendors supported, suggesting that a significant portion of CLEA's early transaction volume stems from Nigeria's car-import trade, though the company has not disclosed a detailed breakdown of vendor usage. Nigeria is one of the largest destinations for used vehicle exports from the United States, and the auction-to-shipping payment chain has historically required multiple intermediaries, each adding fees and delays — making it a natural fit for a consolidated payment rail.

Sheriff Addokayun, CLEA's founder and chief executive, described the launch as part of a broader ambition to move beyond payments into full trade infrastructure. "African businesses are increasingly trading across borders, but managing international supplier payments remains unnecessarily fragmented. At CLEA, we're building more than a payments platform; we're building the financial infrastructure businesses need to trade globally with confidence. Vendor Payments is another step in that journey, giving businesses a faster, simpler and more transparent way to pay trusted suppliers and trading partners while focusing on growing their operations."

Currently, Vendor Payments is restricted to eligible, verified CLEA business customers and supports USD payments to selected suppliers in the United States only. Customers fund their accounts in naira, access foreign currency through the platform, and complete the international payment in what the company describes as a single experience — consolidating what is typically a three- or four-step process involving separate FX and transfer providers into one.

CLEA says it plans to expand the vendor network over time, adding more suppliers and payment destinations, along with tools for discovering vendors, managing invoices, and handling recurring international payments. Whether that expansion moves beyond the US and beyond the auction and shipping niches the feature currently targets will be a key test of how far CLEA can extend a stablecoin rail into a comprehensive trade infrastructure business.

CLEA is not alone in pursuing this market. A cluster of African stablecoin-payment startups, including Ivorypay and pawaPay, have made similar bets over the past year that stablecoin settlement can outcompete legacy correspondent banking on speed and cost for cross-border business payments. The broader trend aligns with growing stablecoin adoption across sub-Saharan Africa, where dollar-pegged digital assets have increasingly been used as a settlement layer for trade payments in economies where local currency liquidity and traditional FX channels are constrained.

Vendor Payments gives CLEA a more specific entry point into that market. Rather than positioning itself as a generic FX or remittance layer, the company is targeting the particular, recurring challenge of paying named suppliers — a segment where preconfigured vendor rails could prove sticky if adoption holds beyond the pilot's 50 businesses.