BOLD TALKS: Elizabeth Rossiello on Fintech Innovation & Cross Border Payments

Good. Thanks for having me, Abby.

Let's see. I mean, my gym is packed with new members. You know, it's that January vibe. We had a wild... I mean, I'm an American that lives abroad. We had a wild 2025 globally.

Yeah. Well, you know, I had written my thesis on the euro and how Europe was coming together on one currency. So that was really present in my mind. I had worked in financial markets in Europe for a while, and seeing how the effect of that happened. And then when there was a crash in 2007, people went to the Swiss Franc, which was the only non-euro market, the largest non-euro market. So I was really thinking about that. And when I moved to Kenya in '09, they were talking a lot about the East African Community. I was living in Nairobi and traveling a lot for work with microfinance to Uganda and Tanzania, which is in the EAC. It was just really hard to transfer currency, really hard to switch your mobile money over. We had M-Pesa in Kenya, but it was a different mobile money in those markets. It just was really inconvenient, and we were kind of living across borders. And these are small countries, right? So it was like moving from state to state in the US and constantly having to switch your currency. So having lived in Europe and then having lived in another market with such close borders, it was really coming to mind like this is impossible to do. You're losing money, you're losing access. And so then when I started working in West Africa and Nigeria and going back and forth from Nairobi to Lagos, I was like this is impossible because the Naira was fluctuating so widely. So it was a really big part of my own personal life and my business life. And then when I started talking to the bank owners, microfinance bank owners, all they talked about was overindebtedness and how they were taking these loans from donors, right? These aid foundations were giving them loans at 12, 14, 16%, and their currency was sliding because these donors were giving it to them in euro and dollar. And then I started to feel really political about it. A lot of my friends were working, and my ex-husband was working for these donors, and I'm thinking this is predatory. You know, there's that great book Confessions of an Economic Hitman. We had studied that in grad school about the World Bank, and you see that across all institutions. And so I was really struggling because I was there on the ground working with the CEOs, the treasurers and CFOs of these institutions. And they have washer women, fisher women, farming communities, really the people of the earth, really trying to make something happen, saving $100, $200. They have the most precious funds, and they're taking predatory loans. And so I'm like, where is the local currency lending? So it was both logistically, like my own life moving across continent to continent through borders, and also just working with these institutions that were taking these predatory loans in hard currencies while living and working in local currencies.

To be fair, it was gender-based, right? I started having kids while I was doing this job. I got pregnant twice in a row and I was still working for microfinance groups. But every time I went for a higher job, they would interview me four, five, six times, pump me for information, and then hire a male who had less experience. And then he would call me up and say, 'Hey, I just got hired for the job they didn't hire you for. Are you free for lunch to tell me how to do this job?' I was like, 'What's going on?' And they're like, 'You can't take this job. You have two children.' And I'm like, 'Well, you gave the job to my ex-husband. She's got the same kids as me. Literally the same kids.' So I was like, 'What's going on?' And then a friend of mine who runs her own business, my best friend there, she's like, 'Just do it yourself.' And I met a seed investor who was like, 'I'm giving out checks to people interested in technology, and definitely I'm interested in Bitcoin. And if you can find a business model with this, I'll invest in you.' And so I was like, I have nothing to lose. Which is sometimes the best motivation to get going. You know, feel like you're at the bottom, you have to prove to everybody what you're capable of. And I had a real passion for what I had seen on the ground for five years. And I was really kind of frustrated and angry that my people, Europeans, Americans were still doing this colonial behavior and lending. And I was like, this is messed up. So I thought if I can do one drop in the bucket to help, why not?

Yeah. So look, when there's a problem, people are looking for solutions. The great thing about digital finance is, whether we were using stable coins or cryptocurrencies or digital currencies or mobile money, all of those are instant settlement or very near instant settlement. A customer can see very quickly if this works, and if it works they will use it. Now obviously the bigger customers take time to get to know you, longer sales cycle. Customers were never our problem. In fact, until the very end, our customers were like, 'No, we love you, stay here, you're our only solution.' The biggest problem was regulation. We were about 10 years too early. We came into the market in 2013 with BitPesa. That was wild. Nobody was using Bitcoin then. I have a thing on my wall here when Forbes did a thing on Bitcoin Africa. That was like 2017, and that was still revolutionary. And we were already in it for four years. So it was really early days. Regulators made it really difficult for us. Banks made it difficult for us. And then when regulations started to come out, you had a lot of new entrants, but still it's still happening. I think only now with Trump and global G8 currencies moving into this and the really big banks moving into it are we finally seeing momentum.

Yeah, I started from Nairobi. I'd been living there I think 5 years at the time. I stayed another couple years in Nairobi. I opened up Uganda and Tanzania while based in Nairobi. Then I moved my kids and my family to Lagos and we were there for about half a year getting things going. And then we moved on to Senegal and we stayed there a couple years. And I was in Lagos I guess once every two weeks for a week. So it was intense at the peak. I think I was sleeping on a plane eight nights a month, going between Senegal, Lagos. We opened Ghana. We had DRC was open for a while. We bought a company in South Africa. We opened Morocco. We bought a company in Spain. I mean it was intense.

Really hitting the pavement and built some incredible teams across the continent.

You know, it's not for the weak.

Yeah, I mean I have so many. We went to DRC. It was such a big market, right? The Democratic Republic of Congo is immense. It's huge. There was like nobody in there. The rates were wild. It seemed so ripe population-wise, but logistically it was just impossible. You couldn't phone any of the banks. You couldn't call, email wasn't working. Now, when you were in DRC, it was fine, but just cross-border communication was really tough. This is again back in 2017, 2018. City was off a lot. And then you went there and it was so modern and advanced, right? They had all these great restaurants, these skyscrapers. Rawbank was doing amazing things in Lubumbashi. And you're like, how can I not get in this? But getting in and out was just really tough. So we ended up pulling out of DRC, which was a shame because I still think it has huge potential. Vodafone was struggling to go in there. ProCredit bank, there were a lot of interesting things happening. That was one of the ones where we were like we have to give up a mega market. Later on we kind of came back in through Cameroon. And then Ghana for a long time took a long time to get off the ground. Again, the regulator kind of stalled and said we're not giving any licenses out and we're going to really crack down on anybody that's not been in. So that was a tough one and took us a long time to get going there, but we were patient and waited it out and we ended up having a great business.

I don't know how many women you see, but I know a lot of women. Now, how did you learn to assemble these teams that could think globally while operating deeply regionally?

You know, as founders, you have a couple of options, right? You can do the cult of personality where it's like 'Elizabeth Pesa, follow me.' That works a little bit sometimes, but then pretty quickly people are like, who the hell is this lady? You can do what we call little FFTs where you have up in each market. I hate that model because you run the risk of having little kings and queens who run amok, right? And you get one subsidiary and one opco that just kind of veers left and you're like come back to the fold. We have had that happen so many times, and that's typically the structure in Africa. You get like a UN agency in and each market runs like their own company. You see that with the telcos a lot, where the Nigerian MTN is so different from South Africa, right? And they make it really difficult to get them to follow the same culture. What we tried to do is create a new culture, an Aza culture or BitPesa culture originally, and we called everybody a 'Watusi,' which means people of the Aza. And we really tried to create what does this company culture want. That worked well. We also were really all about transparency and performance. We didn't get it right right away. We made a lot of mistakes, but we ended up having quarterly performance reviews, transparency reviews, constant survey checks. Premo was amazing in how she ran that, and I think that helped us see across borders. The other thing we did was we operated a matrix model. So people didn't report up to their region. You had regional reports and then functional, which I think is really important when you're working in such big geographies. Otherwise you tend to say 'a they and us' methodology. We did a lot of M&A, and so that matrix might have helped as well, observing in new businesses. But it's not for the weak, a truly cross-border business.

Well, I think I try to live my life boldly, which means without fear, with bravery, and unafraid to do something different, to stand out, right? To be in a different italic, to really kind of look and be different. And I think you can only really make change and move forward if you step away from the pack. And so that's something that I try to think about when I make decisions.

Thank you.