This collaboration integrates Yellow Card’s Payments API with Lightspark Extend, enabling businesses and individuals on the Universal Money Address (UMA) network to send and receive payments in 20 African countries.
The partnership introduces efficient and scalable payment solutions, offering users fast and simple transfers, whether fiat-to-fiat or Bitcoin transactions. The platform supports instant payout methods, including mobile money and bank transfers.
Yellow Card also plans to launch UMA functionality for businesses across the continent. UMA serves as a universal identifier for money, allowing 24/7 transfers of fiat and cryptocurrency via UMA-enabled wallets, exchanges, or banks. This innovation aims to connect African businesses and consumers to a global network, providing an open payment system designed for accessibility and interoperability.
Yellow Card offers secure and cost-effective solutions for buying, selling, and holding digital assets such as stablecoins and tokens like BTC and ETH. Its platform enables simple local currency transactions, simplifying digital currency trading and Bitcoin payments.
The UMA integration is set to go live in early 2025, marking a new era for cross-border transactions and solidifying Africa's role in the global digital payments ecosystem.
The regulatory landscape for cryptocurrency and fintech in Africa is diverse, with countries adopting varying approaches to oversight. While nations like Nigeria and South Africa have taken proactive steps to regulate cryptocurrencies, many others maintain ambiguous or restrictive stances, leading to uncertainty for businesses and users. For instance, Nigeria’s Central Bank has prohibited commercial banks from facilitating crypto transactions until 2023, the country remains a leader in crypto adoption, with an estimated 10.3% of its population owning digital assets. South Africa has moved toward clarity, introducing a regulatory framework under its Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA) to classify cryptocurrencies as financial products. Conversely, countries like Algeria and Morocco have imposed outright bans. This fragmented regulatory environment presents challenges, including inconsistent compliance requirements, limited access to banking infrastructure, and varying levels of government support for fintech innovation.
Every day we send out a free e-mail with the most important headlines of the last 24 hours.
Subscribe now