CEO & Founder, Paga
Revisiting Sui Live Miami: Paga's Vision for Cross-Border Payments in Africa
Revisiting a key moment from Sui Live Miami, where Paga shared its vision for bringing instant, global currency-denominated settlement to Africa through $USDsui integration on Sui.
With over $11 billion in payments processed and 169 million transactions completed in 2025, We are leveraging our scale and infrastructure expertise to help unlock faster, more seamless cross-border payment experiences across the continent.
Watch as our Founder & Group CEO Tayo Oviosu discusses the opportunities ahead for digital payments, settlement innovation, and expanding financial access through blockchain-po...
About Tayo Oviosu
Tayo Oviosu, founder and group CEO of the Nigerian fintech company Paga, has been speaking publicly about the company's strategy and the role of blockchain technology in African financial services. In a June 2026 interview, Oviosu stated that Paga's approach is to build infrastructure that enables others to create financial products, rather than building a bank itself. He described the agent business as a "20-year business" and noted that cash remains dominant in Nigeria, with 80% of transactions conducted in cash. Oviosu also recounted advice from an investor to prioritize cash-flow positivity over growth at all costs, which he said he implemented by leading the company to EBITDA and cash-flow positive status. At the Sui Live Miami conference in May 2026, Oviosu discussed Paga's partnership with the Sui blockchain to offer stablecoin wallets and US dollar accounts backed by the Sui dollar stablecoin. He characterized Bitcoin as an "appreciating asset" comparable to gold and expressed enthusiasm for stablecoins as a tool for payments. Oviosu highlighted Africa's demographic growth—projecting 2.5 billion people on the continent within 25 years—and described currency devaluation as a systemic issue that erodes wealth. He cited Paga's processing volume of $1.5 billion per month and $42 billion since inception, and shared a personal anecdote about a friend's car accident in Lagos to illustrate how the inability to access cash or make quick payments can have life-or-death consequences.
Transcript (19 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
T
Tayo Oviosu0:11
It's Sunday night in Lagos, 9:00 p.m. My friend is driving home when another car runs through a red light and t-bones her at full speed. Glass shatters, airbag explodes. She somehow finds a way to get out of the car and calls me, and we rush to her. She insists that she's fine, but we could see that her left eye was already swelling shut. So, we take her to the hospital.
When we got to the hospital, within a few minutes, she actually had a seizure. The doctors stabilized her, but then after she was stabilized, they said she had to leave. They don't have a neurosurgeon on call. They refuse to give us an ambulance. She's not their patient. So, barely, barely conscious, we take her to the next hospital. But before they could admit her, they asked us one question: Can you pay? It was too late to send wire transfers because it can't be confirmed. They wanted cash. Nobody had cash. So, five of us, five grown adults whose friend is laying there and probably bleeding into her brain, had to go line up at the ATM in the lobby and get the maximum amount of cash we could to pull it together and give it to them before they admitted her.
This is not a movie. This happened. I was there. And in that moment, what was between the care my friend needed to save her life was cash. This is life in Nigeria. This is life in most of Africa. The access and use of money is not just a mere convenience. Sometimes it's the difference between life and death.
My friend's story is a bit dramatic, but the truth is, across Africa, hundreds of millions of people are going through a quieter version of this same story every single day. Africa has a prolonged financial access problem. If you take my home country, Nigeria, people are still paying for bills the way their parents did, in person and in cash. They go physically to pay for their electricity, to pay for water, to pay for their school fees. And you add it all up, they're spending an average of six weeks a year just paying bills. And it doesn't stop at the border. For the person who is importing goods into Nigeria or the parent who's trying to send money abroad to pay for school fees for their kid, it takes them three to five days for money to clear, and they're spending 6.4% in fees. That's about double the global average. So we pay more, it takes longer, and we're cut out of the system of efficiency the rest of the world enjoys. This is a tax on friction, and Africans have been paying this tax for generations.
But here is what people miss when they think about Africa. Today, Africa has 1.4 billion people, and we're growing. In 25 years, there will be 2.5 billion people in Africa. One in four people on Earth will be African. And while the rest of the world is aging, the African population is young and growing younger. 60% of Africans are under the age of 25. And here's what this generation is about. They're a generation that doesn't remember a time before a smartphone. They're a generation that, frankly, doesn't have the patience for six weeks paying bills in cash every year. And they're already doing quite a lot. Almost over one trillion dollars every year in mobile money transactions.
Africa is already the fastest growing region for crypto adoption in the world, and 12 countries already have crypto-friendly regulations on the books, including Nigeria, including South Africa, Kenya, and Mauritius. However, 57% — and we heard this in the last panel — 57% of African adults don't have a bank account. Now, when people hear that number, they see a problem. I see something different. I see Africa that is the single largest financial market, greenfield market, in the world, and that is the opportunity that we are going after.
So, what does this generation want? They want something that all of us in this room want, or take for granted, frankly, which is financial freedom. But not just for themselves, but also for their AI agents that they'll increasingly be using to run their lives. Because you know what? For the next billion users, the next billion users of digital financial services is not just people, but the software that will be running the lives of those people. But financial freedom really comes down to three things. One: the ability to move money quickly and affordably. So, no six weeks, no three to five days. Two: the ability to transact globally regardless of currency. Someone in Lagos should be able to transact with someone in Tokyo just as easily as they would someone across the street from them. Three: the ability to save or invest locally or internationally with ease. Your money should work for you and should not be dependent on where you happened to be born. Move, transact, save. That is financial freedom. And this is exactly what we at Paga have spent the last 17 years building towards.
At Paga, we have a massive transformative purpose. This is what the company exists to do. This is what gets me out of bed and what keeps us going in the hardest of moments. To make it simple for a billion people to access and use money. 1 billion. Not 1 million, not 100 million, 1 billion. Because frankly, anything less is not enough. And a goal this big requires a different approach. We did not set out to build an app. We set out to build an infrastructure, the rails that an entire ecosystem could be built on top of. For 17 years, this is what we have been doing quietly, brick by brick. Today, at the core of Paga is our best-in-class, multicurrency, highly scalable financial services infrastructure. It is what powers our products, and it's what powers thousands of businesses across Africa. And increasingly, it's what's going to power the next wave of innovation on the continent.
So how does Paga's financial infrastructure achieve financial freedom? It's the same three things we talked about before. Move money quickly and affordably — that's our domestic and cross-border rails. Transact globally regardless of currency — that's our multicurrency and stablecoin layer. Save and invest locally or internationally with ease — that's real world assets, bonds, investments coming on-chain. RWAs coming on-chain. Move, transact, save. Built on one infrastructure, for Africans, by Africans. And it's working.
Today, Paga processes $1.5 billion each month. Last year, we processed $11 billion from 169 million transactions. Since inception, we have processed 653 million transactions worth over $42 billion. So, let me put that in some human terms. $42 billion are school fees paid, salaries received, grandmother receiving money from her son in the city, instantly, safely, and at a fraction of the cost of what it used to cost them. This is what the infrastructure was built for. And we're just getting started.
But I'll be lying to you if I said the work is done. Because for all the progress we've made, for all the $42 billion that we've moved, for all the millions of people that we have brought into the financial ecosystem, there are still significant gaps. And these are not small, but they are structural. So let me name them. First, currency stability erodes wealth. When currencies devalue, savings evaporate, buying power goes down. A school teacher in Lagos who has saved all her career watched her earnings and her wealth devalued by three times in a year by no fault of hers. This is not a bug in the African system. This is the experience of hundreds of millions of people.
Two, Africans are locked out of global commerce. A freelancer in Nairobi who has a client in London faces friction at every step of the way. How does she receive the money? How does she spend it? How does she convert it? Each step of the way, there is friction. Three, cross-border payments are broken. We talked about this earlier. Three to five days, 6.4%. This is not an infrastructure for the 21st century, and that is not acceptable. Four, financial access stops at the border. So even for those of us that are fully digital, that are fully on board with digital financial services as Africans, it's still difficult for us, and we don't have it as easy as you would here in the US or in Singapore. These are the four walls of the cage. And until we tear them down, financial freedom on this continent is incomplete.
But tearing down these walls is not a job that we can do on our own. It requires the right rails, the right partner, the right technology that is fast enough, cheap enough, and global enough to serve 1 billion people. And we found that partner: Paga and Sui. And together, we're building what comes next.
So what does Paga and Sui mean for that entrepreneur in Lagos? What does it mean for the freelancer in Nairobi or for the grandmother in the village? Right? It means four things. And each of those four things breaks down one of those walls I talked about earlier. High-yield US dollar accounts backed by the SUI stablecoin. This is a wallet that earns yield while money sits there, so that your money works for you. Remember that school teacher I talked about who lost a third of her earnings? This is for her. So that wall falls down.
On-ramps and off-ramps for crypto. Seamless movement for crypto into local currencies with deep liquidity in all the markets we operate. Enabling people to trade easily, receive money — so that freelancer in Nairobi can receive money, keep it in dollars, move it to shillings when she wants, and use it at any time. Right? That wall falls down.
Tokenized real-world assets on Sui. So bringing real estate, bonds, solar projects from around the world and enabling Africans, so that that African who has $100 can be able to invest in the global economy and grow with the global economy, and where they live and where they were born does not hold them back. That wall falls down.
And last but not least, global financial rails anchored on Sui. This is the foundation of a platform that gives the capability to simplify the movement of money at the speed of email across borders. So four products, four walls, one infrastructure, one mission: to make it simple for 1 billion people to access and use money.
I want to leave you with one last picture. Today, Africa is 1.4 billion people. By 2050, 25 years from now, within the working lifetime of most everyone in this room or watching on the live stream, Africa will be 2.5 billion people. We will have doubled. We will have the youngest, largest middle class in the world. Half a billion people with ambition, with disposable income, and the means to participate in the global economy. And here's a number I want you to remember. By 2050, 40% of all young people on Earth will be African. One in four out of every 10 humans on this planet — the engineers, the scientists, the builders, the artists — will be from this continent. So when we talk about building infrastructure for Africa, I want you to understand what we're saying. We're not talking about building infrastructure for a market. We are talking about building for the future of the world.
I started this talk sharing about a friend of mine whose life was dependent on five of us getting cash out of an ATM fast enough so that she could get the medical care that she needed. That was 14 years ago. The Africa my friend got injured in is not the Africa we are building. The Africa we are building is one where money moves at the speed of email, where someone can get payment from London in real time, can trade with someone in Tokyo in real time, where a freelancer in Nairobi can leverage the money that she got, and where a young person with $100 can participate in the global economy. That Africa is not a projection. It's not 2050. It's not a fantasy. It's happening now. And right now, it's being built by Paga, by Sui, and by a generation of African builders who refuse to live with the friction that their parents lived with. Africa's future is bright, and we are building it today. Join us on this journey.