Payment gateway for Africa

Boldrails is a licensed payment gateway provider for Africa. A pan-African payment gateway lets one business accept and send money across many African markets through a single connection, instead of signing a separate contract in every country.

Most providers cover one bloc. Some are strong in West Africa, others in East Africa, and interoperability networks stitch banks together for other firms. We take a different route. We cover anglophone East and West Africa, which is Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania, Zambia and Uganda, and francophone West Africa in the WAEMU franc zone (XOF), plus Cameroon (XAF).

We are a licensed principal, not an aggregator or a network of partners. We hold the licences, acquire each rail, collect the money, settle it and pay it out ourselves. That means one relationship for the whole continent, plus a single dashboard and settlement flow to reconcile.

We settle your money the way your business needs it. You can take payouts in local currency, such as NGN, KES, GHS, TZS, ZMW, UGX, XOF or XAF. You can also settle in a global currency, or in crypto. Settlement runs on a schedule or on request.

This is how we handle cross-border payments. A business can collect money in several African markets and settle it where it actually banks. You are not stuck holding balances you cannot move.

We also offer crypto-fiat settlement. You collect in local rails, and we settle to a stablecoin or convert crypto inflows to fiat. Some providers only handle stablecoins, and the big networks keep everything in fiat treasury. We do both, so you pick the currency that fits your treasury. Settlement timing depends on the market and rail, so we confirm your windows during onboarding, which takes 3 to 14 days, depending on your case.

Building payments country by country is slow and costly. Each rail is its own contract, its own API key and its own legal relationship. M-Pesa runs through Daraja in Kenya, while Tanzania uses Selcom. Orange Money is set up per country across the WAEMU zone, and Wave keys do not carry from one country to the next. Zambia has no clean public wallet API at all.

That is a stack of integrations, compliance reviews and reconciliation jobs before you take a single payment.

We replace all of it with one API and one settlement relationship. You connect once and go live across every market and rail we support. This is the fastest way to launch payments in more than one African country. Our rail pages for the M-Pesa API, Orange Money API, Wave API and Moov Money API show how each connects underneath.

Card payments run under PCI DSS. We apply KYC, KYB and AML and CFT checks at onboarding and throughout the relationship. Regional instant-payment systems such as PAPSS also connect markets across blocs, and domestic rails like TIPS in Tanzania and NIBSS in Nigeria move money in real time.

Pricing depends on your market, rails and volume, so we quote per business. As market context, published rates run roughly 2.0% to 3.5% per transaction in Tanzania, 2.5% to 4.0% on cards in Zambia, and 0.5% to 4.0% across the WAEMU zone. Wave charges 1% capped at 5,000 FCFA on its direct rail, while aggregator routes layer that up to around 3.6% to 4.0%. As a licensed principal we acquire rails directly, which avoids that extra aggregator markup. Get your quote and onboard in 3 to 14 days, depending on your case.