Nomba, a Nigerian fintech that helps businesses collect payments and access banking services, has secured a $3 million debt facility through CardinalStone Finance Company Limited, the financing arm of CardinalStone Group, to expand its cross-border payments infrastructure across Central Africa.

The company said the facility will provide additional USD liquidity to deploy through its banking relationships in Hong Kong and Singapore. With greater liquidity available across currencies, Nomba can support more transactions and settle payments more efficiently, deepening existing trade corridors while opening new ones.

The fundraising comes as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Asia — particularly China — maintain a significant commercial relationship. Trade between China and the DRC reached $26.7 billion in 2025, with China importing $21.6 billion worth of goods from the DRC and exporting $5.1 billion to the country. The DRC is a leading global producer of cobalt and copper, minerals central to battery manufacturing, which underpins much of this trade with Chinese buyers. That trade volume represents an opportunity for Nomba as demand for reliable payment infrastructure grows.

"This facility gives us more room to move — more liquidity, more corridors, faster settlement," said Yinka Adewale, Nomba's chief executive officer. "It's also a strong signal of confidence in what we're building for the next generation of African businesses. We plan to keep scaling our cross-border infrastructure this year, expanding into new African markets and deepening the payment links between Africa and its trading partners in Asia."

Nomba was founded in 2017 as Kudi.AI, an AI chatbot that helped users process online payments, and launched an agency banking solution in 2018. It subsequently evolved into a provider of payments and banking services for businesses, earning revenue from fees on transactions processed through its platform. In 2023, the company raised $30 million in a pre-Series B round that valued it at more than $150 million and supported its expansion into new business banking products. The pivot from agency banking to B2B payments reflects a broader shift among African fintechs toward serving businesses rather than only consumers.

Nomba announced its expansion into the DRC in November 2025, after quietly operating in the market for several months. Its initial entry centred on remittances, with the company recruiting physical agents to handle inflows from high-volume corridors including China and Dubai. At the time, Nomba described the DRC as its entry point into Central Africa, using remittances to build market presence.

The company's ambition has since broadened. Over the past 18 months, Nomba said it has combined banking relationships with local market operations to address the currency access and settlement challenges that can slow cross-border trade. Access to US dollars is a persistent constraint for businesses in many Central African markets, where local currencies are not freely convertible for international trade.

Through its DRC product, businesses can collect payments online or via point-of-sale terminals, accept card and mobile money payments, and then pay suppliers in Asia, the company said.

"This transaction reflects our confidence in the growth opportunity presented by cross-border payments, and the role innovative financial infrastructure can play in connecting African businesses to global markets," said Ayoola Adeola, managing director of CardinalStone Finance.

In April, Nomba disclosed that its 18-month credit partnership with Globus Bank, a tier-3 commercial bank, had disbursed up to $15.3 million to Nigerian businesses, with less than 1% of the loans classified as non-performing.

Nomba views the DRC as a starting point for expansion across Central and East Africa and has already begun piloting a DRC-to-Zambia corridor. It also sees business-to-business (B2B) demand connecting the DRC with Uganda, Kenya and Angola. Its approach is to use cross-border demand to establish new corridors before assessing whether the opportunity is large enough to justify a deeper local presence.

Nomba currently processes more than $480 million in cross-border payments each month across its DRC operations and its Canadian-licenced money service business. The company plans to raise a further $20 million to $50 million in debt in stages, providing additional capacity to support cross-border trade as it works toward its goal of processing $1 billion in monthly payments. The choice of debt rather than equity financing allows the company to fund liquidity needs without further diluting existing shareholders, a route other African fintechs have also taken to fund working capital.

What to watch next is whether the planned follow-on debt raises materialise, and how quickly the DRC-to-Zambia pilot and the other prospective corridors convert into sustained transaction volume.