In 2019, Oluwatomi Ayorinde was stranded in Mannheim, Germany. His Nigerian bank card, which had worked perfectly at home, simply stopped working abroad. He wrote down the experience—a habit he rarely indulged—because something about it nagged at him. Years later, while building his Y Combinator-backed fintech CrowdForce, it happened again.
Around the same time, Chizaram Ucheaga found himself in France, unable to access his own money, relying on someone else’s card to get by. He had spent years helping banks and agents move cash across Nigeria. If someone who understood payment rails as intimately as he did could still be rendered helpless by a border crossing, he reasoned, this was neither a glitch nor some error on his part.
<a href="https://absafricatv.com/gpei-women-football-stars-team-up-to-kick-polio-out-of-africa/” title=”GPEI-Women football stars team up to kick polio out of Africa”>Africa’s fintech revolution has been defined by the singular obsession of getting money into the continent. Remittances to Africa now exceed USD 100 B annually, with fees that can top 8% and settlements that take days. The largest transaction volumes, investor interest, and development funding have all been tied to inbound payments.
Remittance corridors have been engineered, optimised, and celebrated. Flutterwave, Sendwave, Chipper Cash and a host of others built fortunes solving the inbound problem. But the outbound direction—helping Africans spend, preserve, and move their wealth once they step outside the continent—remained a neglected, broken afterthought.
That neglect is what Ayorinde and Ucheaga are now trying to fix with Timon, a travel payments platform that has quietly processed over USD 47 M in transaction volume since its launch in September 2024, almost entirely through organic, word-of-mouth growth. The startup, recently backed by the notoriously selective crypto accelerator Alliance, now counts 100,000 users across 16 African countries and is deepening its presence in Kenya.
All this came to be because both men happened to cross paths while running an entrepreneurship group together in church, where Ucheaga advised startups as a director at the Founder Institute. After a Sunday church service, Ayorinde called Ucheaga into a car and pitched the idea, asking him to research it and give an honest verdict.
Ucheaga, whom Ayorinde trusted because he was “methodical and unemotional,” ran the numbers and came back with a simple answer: “We should do it.” What made the decision easy was that Ucheaga had hit the same wall years earlier. “We arrived at the same conclusion separately, through our own experiences, before we ever compared notes,” he said.
The accidental infrastructure
Notably, stablecoins—cryptocurrencies pegged to assets like the US dollar—were never on Timon’s original roadmap. The initial vision was a straightforward travel card for Africans, built for loading local currency and spending abroad. But users kept asking for something else. They wanted to fund their wallets with stablecoins.
Ayorinde and Ucheaga built the feature. Today, roughly 70% of all wallet funding on Timon flows through stablecoins.
“We stopped seeing stablecoins as just another funding option and started seeing them as the infrastructure layer for global travel payments,” Ucheaga said.
The shift reveals something counterintuitive about the African consumer. The narrative around cryptocurrency on the continent has largely focused on speculation or remittance substitution. But Timon’s user behaviour suggests a more pragmatic use case in preservation and portability. With currencies across the continent depreciating at unpredictable rates, holding value in a stable digital dollar is becoming less of a niche preference and more of a survival mechanism for a certain class of mobile professionals.
“The person moving money today isn’t always sending it home,” Ayorinde said. “They might be earning in dollars or stablecoins and need to spend that money wherever they physically are, which could be in a different country every month.”
The users who surprised them
When they started building, the founders assumed they were serving a relatively narrow slice of frequent flyers. They were wrong.
“We initially thought we were building for a niche,” Ucheaga said. “But it turned out to be much more.”
Parents using Timon cards to fund their children’s education abroad, avoiding the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of cross-border transfers. Remote workers earning in foreign currencies but living in Accra, Nairobi, or Lagos. Entrepreneurs whose work takes them from Johannesburg to London to Dubai in a single quarter. Some customers live in one country, earn in another, and spend somewhere else entirely—sometimes all three at once.
The company’s expansion strategy has followed this organic demand rather than a conventional market-entry playbook. Kenya emerged as one of Timon’s fastest-growing markets not because the founders targeted it, but because Kenyan users discovered the product through referrals and started pulling others in. The same pattern repeated across Nigeria, Ghana, and South Africa.
“We don’t expand because the market looks attractive on paper,” Ayorinde said. “We expand because customers are already there.”
The scars of previous ventures
Neither founder came to this problem fresh. Both carry the weight of earlier failures and reinventions that shaped how they built Timon.
Ayorinde’s first startup, Mobile Forms, was an offline data collection product. It worked technically. Nobody wanted it. That failure forced a pivot as he realised customers didn’t just need software; they needed people on the ground to collect data, which led to CrowdForce, a network of field agents. CrowdForce eventually birthed PayForce, a financial services business that processed millions in monthly volume and was acquired by FairMoney in 2023.
“The biggest lesson is not to fall in love with a solution,” Ayorinde said. “Keep listening until you understand the real problem.”
At Timon, he applied that lesson with deliberate restraint. The company spent six months building and listening before scaling at all. “What took six years to learn at my previous venture, we applied in under two years at Timon.”
Ucheaga learned his lesson through a different kind of grind. In the mid-2000s, he helped build a two-way SMS platform for banks and pension administrators. When regulations restricted unsolicited messaging, the business had to pivot. They adapted digital pen technology for the Nigerian market and launched Mavis Talking Books, an offline learning platform that served over 20,000 learners.
“Every pivot begins with paying attention,” Ucheaga said. “If you’re willing to adapt to what the market is telling you, today’s setback can become tomorrow’s business.”
The financial passport
Timon now offers virtual and physical payment cards, cross-border transfers, local payouts, and global eSIMs, all accessible through a single app. Physical cards can be picked up at airports or delivered within 24 to 48 hours.
But the founders are restless with the “travel card” label. They describe what they’re building as a “financial passport”, a single platform that handles everything a traveller needs, from flights and accommodation to insurance and local spending, whether they’re an African leaving the continent or a foreigner entering it.
“Ten years from now, success means people only need two things when they travel: their national passport and their financial passport,” Ucheaga said.
For that vision to become reality, African finance needs to become dramatically more interoperable. The future, as the founders see it, isn’t about replacing banks or card networks but making it seamless to move between stablecoins, local currencies, cards, and local payment rails like M-Pesa.
Ayorinde is more direct about what he thinks is coming. “Stablecoins are not just another fintech trend,” he said. “They are changing the fundamental infrastructure of finance. I genuinely believe every financial institution that wants to remain relevant over the next twenty years needs a stablecoin strategy.”
The sceptic’s test
If a sceptical African bank executive challenged the premise, arguing that remittances remain the dominant opportunity, Ucheaga would put down the numbers first. Timon has processed USD 47 M, currently running at roughly USD 4.5 M a month, with users in 16 countries.
But the evidence he finds most persuasive is less the volume and more the qualitative signal.
“The feedback we hear most often from customers is: ‘it just works,’” he said. “That’s the whole case in three words. Legacy cards fail exactly at the moment a customer crosses a border, and currencies across the continent keep depreciating, pushing more people to hold and move value outside their local currency. That’s a different problem from remittances, and it’s the one we think the next decade of African fintech gets built around.”
Whether Timon becomes the financial passport of that future, or merely an early signal of a broader shift, remains an open question. But the problem it’s addressing is evident in the fact that African payment infrastructure has been a one-way valve for too long. The money flows in, but getting it out, or moving it around once one goes elsewhere, is still messy.
Two founders stranded in Germany and France, card in hand yet not able to spend, learned that lesson the hard way. They’re betting others won’t have to.
