Visa tests cross-border stablecoin settlement in DR Congo with M-Pesa Africa

Visa has launched a pilot in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to test stablecoins for settling cross-border mobile money transactions, with M-Pesa Africa and Onafriq in the loop. For high-risk PSPs, the detail that matters is simple: Visa Pay is now being used to settle M-Pesa mobile wallet top-ups in stablecoins behind the scenes.

1. Visa’s senior vice-president and head of products and solutions CEMEA, Godfrey Sullivan, said the company has launched a proposition called Visa Pay, where “as you top up your M-Pesa wallet, the transaction is settled in stablecoins in the background.” That turns stablecoins from a trading asset into settlement plumbing.
2. Visa Pay operates as a Payments-as-a-Service platform and was designed and launched in the Democratic Republic of the Congo last September through an API connection with Onafriq. The current pilot extends that setup into cross-border mobile money settlement.
3. The initiative was announced this week in partnership with M-Pesa Africa and digital payments network Onafriq. It is the latest Visa and M-Pesa Africa collaboration, following the March rollout of their jointly developed tokenised Tap-to-Pay feature on the M-Pesa super-app in Tanzania.
4. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is a useful proving ground for this kind of test because, according to Financial Sector Deepening Africa (FSD Africa), only 30% of the country’s adult population has access to formal financial services. That leaves plenty of room for mobile money rails and alternative settlement tools to do the heavy lifting.
5. Sullivan said banks, fintechs, and mobile network operators will adopt stablecoins to address cross-border payments, remittances, and business-to-business payments because existing solutions have not “really cracked these problems yet.” Visa’s move also lands in the same month that Mastercard teamed up with Yellow Card, a licensed stablecoin infrastructure provider operating primarily across Africa, to test stablecoins for cross-border remittances.