Nigerian fintech Nomba has secured a $3 million debt facility from CardinalStone Finance Company Limited to expand its cross-border payments infrastructure across Central Africa, with the funding expected to improve liquidity, speed up settlements and help businesses access more reliable payment services across key trade corridors.
The facility, provided through CardinalStone Group’s financing arm, will give Nomba more US dollar liquidity to deploy through its banking relationships in Hong Kong and Singapore. The additional liquidity will allow the fintech to support more transactions across different currencies, settle payments more efficiently and strengthen existing trade links while opening new corridors.
For businesses involved in cross-border trade, improved access to foreign currency and faster settlement can reduce some of the challenges associated with international payments. Nomba sees this as an important opportunity as commercial activity between Africa and Asian markets continues to grow.
DRC Expansion Opens New Trade Opportunities
The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is at the centre of Nomba’s Central African strategy. 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 scale of this trade highlights the need for payment systems that can help businesses move money more efficiently between the two markets.
Nomba Chief Executive Officer Yinka Adewale said the new facility would give the company greater capacity to support this activity. “This facility gives us more room to move — more liquidity, more corridors, faster settlement,” he said.
Adewale added that the financing also showed confidence in Nomba’s plans to build infrastructure for African businesses trading internationally. The company plans to continue expanding into African markets while strengthening payment connections between the continent and its Asian trading partners.
Nomba entered the DRC in November 2025 after operating quietly in the market for several months. Its initial focus was remittances, using physical agents to manage inflows from major corridors such as China and Dubai. The company viewed the DRC as an entry point into Central Africa, but its ambitions have since grown beyond remittances.
Through its DRC service, businesses can collect payments online or through point-of-sale terminals, accept card and mobile money payments and make payments to suppliers in Asia. Over the past 18 months, Nomba said it has combined banking relationships with local operations to address currency access and settlement challenges affecting cross-border trade.
Building More Corridors Across Africa
Nomba is already testing a DRC-to-Zambia payment corridor and sees further business-to-business opportunities linking the DRC with Uganda, Kenya and Angola. Rather than immediately establishing a full local presence in every market, the company plans to use actual cross-border demand to identify corridors where deeper investment is justified.
CardinalStone Finance Managing Director Ayoola Adeola said the transaction reflected the company’s confidence in the growth potential of cross-border payments and the ability of financial infrastructure to connect African businesses with global markets.
Nomba’s growth has developed significantly since it was founded in 2017 as Kudi.AI, an AI chatbot that helped users process online payments. It launched agency banking in 2018 before evolving into a business payments and banking provider. In 2023, it raised $30 million in a pre-Series B funding round that valued the company at more than $150 million.
The fintech has also built experience in business lending. In April, Nomba disclosed that its 18-month credit partnership with Globus Bank had disbursed up to $15.3 million to Nigerian businesses, with less than 1% of the loans classified as non-performing.
Nomba currently processes more than $480 million in cross-border payments each month through its DRC operations and Canadian-licensed money service business. The company plans to raise a further $20 million to $50 million in debt in stages as it increases its capacity and works towards its target of processing $1 billion in monthly payments.
