Amara Okafor: "The hardest part isn't the tech — it's the trust"

Amara Okafor has a habit, when asked a question she thinks is the wrong question, of looking at you for a long, polite moment before answering anyway.

I'd just asked her — over a video call from her office in Yaba, Lagos — how she thought about competing with the global remittance giants now that StellarPay had reached scale. The pause stretched.

"That's the question every Western journalist asks," she said. "And it's the wrong question. We don't compete with them. We operate in a market they don't actually understand."

The product

StellarPay started in 2021 as a B2B cross-border payments API. Three years later, it serves twelve million end users across twenty-three African countries, processes more than $4 billion in annualized payment volume, and — as we covered in the funding announcement two days ago — has just closed a $40 million Series A led by Tiger Global.

The headline number obscures the more interesting story underneath. StellarPay's median transaction settlement time is under nine seconds. Their cost-to-serve per transaction is, by Okafor's account, less than a tenth of what the legacy correspondent-banking rails charge for the same flow. And — uniquely — the company's gross margin has expanded every quarter for the past nine.

"The economics of African cross-border payments were broken because the infrastructure was designed by people who didn't move money across Africa," she said. "Once you start with the assumption that you're going to do it well, everything looks different."

What she means by trust

The recurring word throughout our conversation was trust. Okafor is exhausted, she says, by Western framings that focus on the technical challenge of cross-border payments. The technical challenge, she argues, is largely solved.

"Building software that moves money is not difficult. We've been doing it for thirty years. What's difficult is convincing a forty-five-year-old trader in Onitsha, who has been burned by three different fintech products in the past five years, that this one is the one she should run her business on."

That conviction work — earning trust at the consumer level — is, in Okafor's telling, where StellarPay actually spent its first two years. She rejects the framing that the company succeeded because of its API. The company succeeded, she argues, because it spent absurd amounts of time on customer support, dispute resolution, and quietly making good on errors that weren't technically StellarPay's fault.

"We absorbed losses we shouldn't have absorbed. We refunded transactions that weren't our liability. We sent senior people to physically visit customers when something went wrong. That's not in any operating playbook. But it's the reason we have the customer base we have."

On the Tiger Global round

I asked Okafor what changed in the conversation with Tiger Global that closed the deal. She thought for a moment.

"They came in with the assumption that we were a payments company. They left understanding we're a trust company that happens to operate on payment rails. Once that frame shift happened, the conversation was different."

What's next, she said, isn't more corridors. It's more depth in the corridors already operating. The product she's most excited about for the rest of 2026 isn't the next payment integration. It's a treasury product aimed at the African SMBs that today use StellarPay only for transactions — and that, she believes, will eventually anchor their entire financial stack on the company.

What she'd tell founders

I asked, near the end, what she'd say to other African founders trying to raise from Western late-stage funds in this market. Her answer was short.

"Don't make the deck about Africa. Make it about your business. The decks I see from African founders explain Africa to the investor as if the investor will care. The investor doesn't care. They care whether your numbers compound."

For more from Okafor and the broader African fintech ecosystem, follow our interviews section.