For a Nigerian importer, the hard part of paying an overseas supplier is rarely knowing who to pay. It is turning naira into dollars, euros, sterling or yuan at the right size and the right time, and getting the money to the supplier before a shipping window closes.
Clea, a fintech that emerged from stealth this year, is building a route through that problem using stablecoins as a settlement layer. Its founder and CEO, Sheriff Adedokun, spoke to The Fintech Times about how the rails work, what it takes to open a corridor and why compliance ended up inside the product rather than alongside it.
A slow, fragmented process
Adedokun describes a familiar pattern. “A Nigerian importer may have naira available today, yet struggle to access USD, EUR, GBP or CNY at the exact size and time required,” he said. “Traditional bank processes can involve FX allocation delays, manual documentation, multiple intermediaries and settlement times of several days.”
The consequences land on the supplier relationship. “When the supplier is an auction house, shipper or manufacturer working to a deadline, that delay can mean storage fees, lost discounts, cancelled orders or missed shipping windows.”
Informal FX channels have filled the gap, but Adedokun argues they trade one problem for another: “weak transparency, payments arriving from unrelated third parties, difficult reconciliation and higher fraud or compliance risk.” Clea’s answer is to combine local funding, FX conversion and supplier settlement in one workflow, so that the importer “funds locally, converts at a visible rate and pays a verified overseas supplier through formal banking rails, with the transaction linked back to the importer and a complete audit trail.”
Fiat at the edges, stablecoins in the middle
Neither end of a Clea payment touches crypto. “The simplest way to think about Clea is that the customer experience is fiat, while stablecoins operate in the settlement layer behind the scenes,” Adedokun said.
An importer funds a Clea account in naira. Once the funds are confirmed, the company sources the foreign-currency liquidity, and “depending on the corridor and liquidity source, the treasury leg can be converted into a dollar-denominated stablecoin such as USDC and moved across blockchain rails to a settlement partner.”
On the far side, the value is off-ramped back into fiat. “The stablecoin is not what the supplier ultimately receives,” he said. The supplier is paid in the currency it expects, into a normal bank account, over rails that include wire, ACH, RTP and international transfer routes depending on the destination.
“Blockchain compresses the cross-border treasury leg, while the endpoints remain familiar fiat accounts,” Adedokun said. “Neither the African importer nor the overseas supplier needs to hold crypto or change how they normally receive and account for business payments.”
Opening a corridor
Nigeria is Clea’s core originating market today, with payouts in USD, EUR, GBP and CNY giving customers access to sourcing markets in the US, the UK, Europe and China. Where it can, the company pays out over domestic banking rails at the receiving end “rather than treating every transaction as a traditional correspondent-bank transfer”.
Adding a corridor, he said, “is much more than adding another currency to a dropdown. We need reliable local collection, sufficient FX liquidity, a compliant path for moving value, appropriate fiat on/off-ramp infrastructure, and banking or payout partners capable of delivering funds reliably to the beneficiary.” On top of that sits the regulatory layer: licensing, sanctions screening, transaction monitoring, settlement finality, banking cut-off times and documentation from businesses on both sides.
“The real challenge is building a corridor that remains fast and commercially viable while meeting the compliance, treasury, liquidity and reconciliation requirements needed to operate reliably at scale.”
Compliance by corridor
Clea is a registered Money Services Business and works with regulated banking, payment, FX and digital asset providers in the markets it serves. Adedokun stresses that one registration does not travel. “A registration in one market does not give us permission to perform every function in another,” he said. “For each corridor, we map the full payment flow, including local collection, FX conversion, stablecoin settlement, off-ramping and beneficiary payout. We then establish which entity or regulated partner can legally perform each part.”
Customer checks cover KYC and KYB, beneficial ownership, sanctions screening and ongoing transaction monitoring, with invoices and payment purpose captured for each transfer. On FX, the company routes across multiple liquidity providers, assessing “liquidity, pricing and settlement capability before routing transactions, which gives us flexibility and helps manage concentration risk.”
The hardest problem so far, he said, has been reconciling global verification standards with how legitimate African businesses actually operate. “Many international verification systems were built around assumptions that work well in the US or Europe, but do not always translate cleanly to African markets. A legitimate Nigerian auto dealer, for example, can process substantial transaction volumes without having a sophisticated website. Proof of address can also work differently, with utility bills sometimes linked to a property owner rather than the business occupying the premises.”
Clea’s response was to build compliance into the payment workflow itself, verifying customers and beneficiaries, capturing invoices and payment purposes, screening transactions and passing the data to infrastructure partners programmatically. “We have also worked closely with partners to establish alternative forms of evidence that reflect how businesses operate in each local market,” Adedokun said. “This has allowed us to maintain strong controls while keeping legitimate trade moving.”
Liquidity that moves
Looking ahead, Adedokun expects stablecoins to become “a core part of African business payments, increasingly embedded within the underlying payment infrastructure.” He singles out liquidity mobility as the biggest opportunity. “Stablecoins allow businesses to move dollar value across markets quickly and connect to different payout networks without having to build the same prefunding structure in every corridor.”
He also expects the market to shift further from consumer crypto towards regulated B2B infrastructure, naming supplier payments, treasury management, merchant settlement and fintech APIs as the areas where stablecoin settlement can play a meaningful role. “The companies that get this right will make the technology increasingly invisible,” he said.
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