Africa's mobile money networks have over 800 million registered accounts spread across dozens of closed loops. Moving money between them; across borders, currencies, and regulatory jurisdictions, remains the unfinished infrastructure project of a generation. Onafriq was built on the thesis that someone had to connect the dots. Samora Kariuki sits down with Dare Okoudjou, founder and CEO of Onafriq (formerly MFS Africa), the Pan-African payment network that connects mobile money wallets, bank accounts, cards, and now stablecoin rails across 40+ countries. Dare's path is unusual: an engineer who trained at PricewaterhouseCoopers in Paris, helped architect MTN Mobile Money across Africa from 2006 to 2009, and then left to build the interoperability layer he could see the market would eventually require. Sixteen years later, the vision has proven out, though the path there looked almost nothing like the original plan. This conversation is a rare inside account of what it actually takes to build foundational financial infrastructure in Africa. Dare breaks down the layered architecture of cross-border payments (messaging, risk, currency, settlement), the strategic acquisitions of Beyonic and GTP that accelerated Onafriq's enterprise relationships, and why the platform is now placing simultaneous bets on mobile money interoperability, cards, PAPSS, and stablecoins. He also challenges the entire African fintech industry to ask whether mobile money, as currently architected, is still the right model. In This Episode, You Will Hear: The MTN Origin: How Dare helped build the foundations of MTN MoMo across Africa and why that experience made the MFS Africa opportunity obvious in retrospect. The Fax Machine Problem: Why being early to a network business means spending years being nearly useless, and why the goal is simply not to die until the vision comes true. The Remittance Framing Problem: Why calling intra-African cross-border payments "remittances" actively harms how banks, investors, and regulators engage with the industry. The Acquisition Logic: Why Onafriq bought Beyonic and GTP, and what enterprise relationships with banks actually require that organic sales cannot deliver. Payments Always Revert to Standard: Why Dare believes mobile money must achieve GSM-style interoperability or risk being absorbed into the card standard. The Stablecoin Thesis: Why stablecoins are best understood as programmable mobile money for the internet, and why the dollar stablecoin narrative may create systemic risks for African banking systems. If M-Pesa Were Built Today: The sharpest strategic question in African fintech, posed by someone who was in the room when the original was designed. Key Quote: "The goal was simply not to die until it came true." Connect with Us: Samora Kariuki (Host): https://www.linkedin.com/in/samorakariuki/ Dare Okoudjou (Guest): https://www.linkedin.com/in/dare-okoudjou/ Frontier Fintech: https://frontierfintech.substack.com
