African fintech NALA is increasingly positioning itself not simply as a remittance company, but as stablecoin payment infrastructure for emerging markets, according to BitcoinKE. The company's Rafiki platform reports that payout volumes have grown 17x over the past 18 months, while maintaining a 96.6% average payout success rate across Africa and Asia.

That positioning places NALA on the supply side of the payments stack: rather than serving only end users, it now counts some of the world's largest cross-border payments firms among the customers running their stablecoin payouts through its infrastructure.

Automated Routing Across Rails

The infrastructure uses automated routing to move transactions across local payment rails and stablecoin networks. The strategy is straightforward: stablecoins handle cross-border settlement, while Rafiki handles local distribution. In markets where individual payment rails are less reliable, the platform monitors performance continuously and re-routes transactions automatically. The split matters because a cross-border payment is only complete once funds reach a local recipient, which is what makes the last-mile hop onto domestic rails the decisive test of reliability.

According to NALA CEO Benjamin Fernandes, the routing layer is central to those results.

"A big part of that is how we route. In markets where individual rails are less reliable, Rafiki's AI agents monitor performance and re-route transactions to the best-performing path automatically, before a payout fails, not after," Fernandes said.

Adoption by Major Payments Firms

That model is already in commercial use at MoneyGram, one of the world's largest cross-border payments companies, which partnered with NALA to use Rafiki for stablecoin settlement and on/off-ramps across Africa and Asia. The arrangement covers stablecoin settlement as well as the on- and off-ramps that convert between stablecoins and local fiat currencies in both regions. For a company selling payment infrastructure, that success rate functions as the core product: at institutional scale, payout reliability determines whether large volumes of customer funds arrive as promised.

"Today, we service 3 of 6 biggest cross-border payments companies," the NALA chief executive said.

The company's stablecoin push is not new. BitcoinKE reported in December 2025 that NALA, described as one of Africa's leading fintechs with over 1 million active users, was building stablecoin-to-fiat infrastructure. At the time, Fernandes argued that on/off-ramp infrastructure could become increasingly valuable as stablecoins move deeper into payments.

Fernandes attributes the platform's rapid adoption to consistency of service.

"That consistency is why partners start with one corridor and expand. Nearly all of our customers have launched more than 1 market and we haven't churned a single customer in 19 months," he said.

A Year of Expansion

The growth figures cap a period of expansion for NALA's stablecoin business. In a separate development, the company partnered with Noah to launch a stablecoin settlement network on regulated rails, and it later secured a $50 million credit facility to scale its stablecoin payments infrastructure. With credit capacity earmarked for scaling and settlement extending onto regulated rails, how these pieces translate into continued volume growth is the figure to watch as the platform's trajectory develops.