A Look Into Africa’s Cross-Border Money Movement

Grace Anyetei calls herself an ‘analytical creative’, a combination that sounds contradictory until she explains it. Numbers are her playground, but so are ideas, the kind that require dismantling assumptions, stretching boundaries, and seeing beyond what is neatly presented. It is this duality that has quietly shaped her ascent across Africa’s payments sector.

Born and raised in Nairobi, Grace is the embodiment of East meeting West, a Kenyan upbringing intertwined with Ghanaian roots. But it is her professional journey, marked by deliberate pivots and steep learning curves, that reveals the engine behind her rise. Seven years ago, she entered the card payments space with Tutuka (now Paymentology), working on what would become one of Kenya’s most recognizable digital financial tools: the M-PESA GlobalPay card. She handled card processing, managed East Africa as a region, and began sharpening the muscle that would later define her leadership, understanding how different African markets breathe.

From Tutuka, she moved to IDT, one of Onafriq’s key partners, where remittances intersected with a budding blockchain wallet initiative. It was here, while helping map blockchain enablement across Africa, that she first crossed paths with the team from Onafriq, the people she would later join, and eventually help lead.

Today, Anyetei wears different hats. As Regional Commercial Director at Onafriq, she oversees Kenya’s market while also steering the organization’s cards portfolio across 26 countries in the South and Eastern African region. She is also acting Managing Director for that entire geography, responsible for driving growth, developing strategy, and aligning the complex machinery of the continent’s payment corridors. Onafriq itself spans 43 countries, making her universe vast and endlessly dynamic.

Yet she speaks about the work with a remarkable sense of clarity.

“Africa can never be approached with a blanket solution,” she says. “What works in Kenya will not work in South Africa. Kenya is defined by mobile money; South Africa is defined by cards and neobanks. Uganda is still heavily cash-driven. So if I walk into a market with a pre-set playbook, I will not succeed. I have to understand what each customer is trying to achieve, then bring in what I call a shared KPI, your goal and mine, moving in the same direction.”

This philosophy of listening first and designing second is what she believes gives Onafriq its edge in a landscape where interoperability is no longer a luxury but a necessity.

What Anyetei and her team have built is a network that quietly powers some of Africa’s most recognizable financial experiences. Onafriq integrates across wallets from giants like MTN, Airtel, M-PESA Africa, and Axion Group, enabling cross-border movement that most consumers use daily without knowing the engine behind it. The simplicity of sending money from Kenya to Uganda through an app belies a complex orchestration of connections that Onafriq manages seamlessly in the background.

Anyetei breaks it down with the calm of someone who has explained it a hundred times, but still cares deeply about its elegance.

“If you’re in Kenya and want to send money to Uganda, you simply open your M-PESA app. You don’t know that it’s Onafriq enabling that flow. But behind that transfer is a connection to MTN Uganda, or Vodacom Tanzania, or MTN Côte d’Ivoire. We integrate with these networks, giving access to over a billion mobile money wallets. From there, we unlock everything else, merchant collections, international money transfer, and now even card-to-wallet interoperability.”

This last component, card-to-wallet, is one of the company’s newest innovations, and one Anyetei speaks about with visible enthusiasm. Onafriq calls it Easy Transfer, a layer that allows users to move funds between cards and mobile wallets across borders, making the card more than a payment device but a mobile money extension.

This kind of innovation, however, lives under the watchful eye of one of Africa’s most sensitive sectors: compliance.

“Compliance isn’t optional for us,” she says. “It’s trust. If a customer gives you their money, the least you can do is ensure it reaches where it’s meant to go safely. So we work with lawyers, a strong governance team, and partnerships that give us regulatory approval. We cannot afford reputational risk or operational risk. For us, trust is part of the product.”

As Africa leans into emerging technologies like blockchain, stablecoins, and API-led systems, Anyetei sees opportunity, but only if policymakers move with both courage and precision. Kenya’s recent VAT bill on digital assets is, in her view, the beginning of a much bigger conversation.

“The bill is signed, but now the real work begins,” she says. “We need regulations that do not inhibit growth. Blockchain offers real-time movement that can transform payments, especially for people who want money reflected now, not three days later like the SWIFT system. But if regulations aren’t thoughtful, we risk making the Kenyan shilling scarce or discouraging innovation. We must design frameworks that work for our context, not copy-paste from the U.S. or anywhere else.”

Anyetei points to global momentum as signals that Africa cannot afford to lag behind. The future, she believes, will be wallet-driven, mobile-first, and instant. But it will also require governments, telcos, banks, and fintechs to harmonize their views.

When asked about the biggest technical or operational challenges she faces in Kenya, Anyetei surprisingly doesn’t mention fragmentation, infrastructure gaps, or regulatory delays. Instead, she talks about the promise of speed in a region defined by contrasting capabilities.

In Kenya, M-PESA expects a transfer between wallets to reflect within eight seconds. Cross the border into Uganda, and that same movement might take 15. It is a small difference on paper, but a significant one when designing for scale across 26 markets.

“Uniformity is the hardest part,” she admits. “Customers in different countries expect different speeds and have different tolerances. But excellence must be standard. Our API has to work, and work well. Our communication has to be clear. Our technology has to be seamless. When we look at NPS scores, they must reflect that consistency.”

The solution? A single API connecting all markets. A design choice that simplifies integration for partners while masking the complexity of Onafriq’s internal operations.

Anyetei’s journey reads like the evolution of African payments itself: from cards to wallets, from remittances to real-time rails, from regional solutions to continental connectivity. She is part strategist, part builder, and part dreamer, but grounded enough to navigate the regulatory, operational, and cultural nuances that define Africa’s financial landscape.

What emerges is a portrait of a leader determined to make movement (of money, of ideas, of opportunity) simpler for the everyday African.

And perhaps that is what she means by being an analytical creative: the ability to calculate the possibilities, then imagine something bigger.