Juicyway, a cross-border payments company, is building a platform to connect African assets with global investors, according to its founder and chief executive, Ife Johnson, who argued that faster payments alone cannot solve the continent's financing problem.

Speaking at Moonshot by TechCabal in Lagos, Johnson outlined plans for the 'People's Exchange', which would use tokenisation — the creation of blockchain-based records of assets and securities — to help businesses raise money across markets. Johnson said Juicyway has received approval in principle — a preliminary regulatory step that precedes full registration — from Nigeria's Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to build the exchange.

"We've produced category winners without producing enough shared infrastructure for entire categories to grow," he said. "Africa needs more shared infrastructure and fewer isolated winners."

It is a constraint Juicyway confronts daily. Software can send a payment instruction in seconds, but the money to complete that payment still has to be sitting in the right currency, in the right country.

"For roughly 95% of the transactions that we have to carry out, we have to perform settlements," Johnson said. The exchange's first focus would be financing that liquidity, he said, with later uses in mortgages, trade receivables, energy, commodities and stakes in private companies.

In his view, the same shortage runs through the wider economy: businesses hold receivables, projects need investment and households need long-term loans, but the capital to fund them is split across dozens of small markets.

Africa's unmet demand for trade finance was between $74 billion and $92 billion in 2024, according to the African Development Bank's 2025 trade finance report. African companies raised about $220 billion in equity on local stock markets between 2000 and 2024 — just 1% of the equity raised worldwide — according to the OECD's Africa Capital Markets Report 2025. Both figures underline the fragmentation Johnson described — capital sitting in one country, investment demand in another, with no single market connecting them.

Johnson proposed tokenising investments to structure them, record who owns them and sell them across borders, with stablecoins — digital tokens pegged to currencies such as the US dollar — moving and settling the money. "I don't think Africa needs 29 exchanges," he said. "I think it needs one market that connects them all."

The aim is to let African businesses reach investors beyond their home markets. Making that work will take more than a shared technology platform: investors will need confidence in the underlying assets, in their ownership rights, and in how they get repaid or sell their stakes.

Johnson framed the exchange as a long-term project, citing his son. "I want his generation to inherit markets that finance the ambitions, rather than ambitions constrained by the absence of markets," he said.