Every transformative company begins with a simple idea. For Stabyl, that idea was born not in a boardroom, but during conversations between classmates at the University of Oxford, where discussions about the future of digital finance evolved into a bold vision for solving one of Africa’s biggest financial challenges.

Between 2021 and 2022, Prince Nnamdi Ekeh, then Co-CEO of Konga Group, and fellow Oxford MBA student Zachary Schwartzman repeatedly exchanged ideas on how stablecoin technology could address the persistent inefficiencies surrounding foreign exchange across African markets. Their shared conviction later attracted software engineer Michael Anyi, whose decade-long experience building financial infrastructure helped transform those conversations into a viable technology platform.

Today, that vision has materialized into Stabyl, a fintech company emerging from stealth with a $2.7 million pre-seed investment led by Konga. The company is building institutional-grade foreign exchange infrastructure that enables banks, payment service providers, and financial institutions to access liquidity more efficiently while significantly reducing settlement times.

Net foreign exchange inflow into Nigeria’s economy was $6.92 billion in February 2026, according to the Central Bank of Nigeria’s monthly economic report. Yet, the infrastructure through which that liquidity moves is fragmented, with payment service providers, banks and large institutions relying on multiple relationships to source foreign exchange.

“Our goal is to connect these participants on one platform, creating the deepest and most accessible liquidity pool on the continent,” Schwartzman said.

How Stabyl Works

Stabyl is neither a consumer-facing app nor a cross-border payments platform. The problem it aims to solve lies at the point where financial institutions source foreign exchange before a payment can be made.

Ekeh illustrated this with the example of a large institution like Konga. He explained that when the e-commerce company needs foreign exchange, its treasury team typically reaches out to multiple banks, payment service providers, and liquidity providers to compare rates and source liquidity. By the time approvals are received and counterparties respond, market prices may already have shifted, forcing the process to begin again or settle at a less favourable rate.

Stabyyl’s solution is to replace those fragmented bilateral negotiations with a central limit order book (CLOB), in which buyers and sellers of foreign exchange can automatically post and match orders.

“Everybody on Stabyl can create a transaction, and that transaction gets matched and queued immediately, Anyi told TechCabal in an interview on Friday. “That entire process of having to make calls, hold transactions, figure out rates and do all this manual labour is completely removed.”

The startup said its liquidity is aggregated from participating payment service providers (PSPs) and financial institutions, and maintains its own liquidity reserves with unnamed selected partners to ensure liquidity remains available when demand exceeds natural market activity.

On Stabyl, settlement occurs across both traditional banking infrastructure and blockchain networks. For fiat transactions, Stabyl noted that it partnered with KongaPay as its official naira settlement partner. On the stablecoin settlement side, wallet infrastructure is provided by DFNS, a multi-party computation (MPC) wallet provider.

The company noted that it currently supports USDT (Tether) and USDC (USD Coin) stablecoins. Still, it maintained that its infrastructure is blockchain-agnostic, selecting networks based on cost, speed, settlement finality, and the needs of its institutional clients.

“Stabyl is connecting stablecoin rails with fiat banking rails because you can’t separate the two,” Ekeh noted. “Stablecoins are great, but they’re not great on their own. You still need to convert back to local currency.”

In practice, when a PSP deposits naira on Stabyl through KongaPay, it can then place an order at its preferred exchange rate or match one already available on the platform. Once the transaction is executed, participants can settle and withdraw in either fiat currency or stablecoins.

For institutions that want to integrate the infrastructure directly into their treasury systems, Stabyl also noted that it provides Application Programming Interface (APIs) that offer programmatic access to its liquidity pool.

The business of building the infrastructure

Many FX businesses in Nigeria make money by capitalising on the exchange rate spread, meaning they buy currencies at a low rate and sell them at a higher rate.  Rather than holding inventory and earning a spread, Stabyl said it charges a take rate on each transaction processed through the platform.

The company did not disclose the figure but said it intentionally keeps it low to incentivise institutions to push more volume through the platform.

“What we want to do is grow the liquidity pot,” Schwartzman said. “That is where we see the opportunity: by growing liquidity for clients. We believe that will allow clients to provide more liquidity, do more trades, and be more successful.”

Stabyl’s emergence from stealth comes as Nigeria’s regulatory environment for digital assets has shifted considerably in its favour. The CBN lifted its ban on cryptocurrency transactions in 2023, and the Securities and Exchange Commission followed with its Accelerated Regulatory Incubation Programme, bringing virtual asset service providers into a formal compliance framework.

“The regulatory direction is clear,” Schwartzman said. “We would rather build this infrastructure correctly from the start, working hand-in-hand with regulators, than arrive late to a settled market.”

In the same space, companies like Onafriq, Yellow Card and Fincra are building payment infrastructure across Africa. Stabyl, however, maintained that these companies are its potential customers, not competitors.

“We’re trying to provide liquidity to other liquidity providers, foreign exchange companies, payment service providers and financial institutions,” Schwartzman said. “So, if we look at everything as a pie, we’re not trying to gain market share from this pie. We’re creating more dough to make this a bigger pie for everyone.”

While many fintech companies are focused on facilitating payments, Stabyl is addressing the infrastructure layer that powers those payments. By simplifying access to foreign exchange liquidity and combining traditional banking rails with stablecoin technology, the company aims to remove long-standing inefficiencies that have constrained cross-border commerce across Africa.

The newly secured pre-seed funding will accelerate regulatory licensing, platform development, compliance, and market expansion. Beyond serving as the lead investor, Konga also acts as Stabyl’s official naira settlement partner through KongaPay and provides the company’s first large-scale commercial deployment.

According to Ekeh, the partnership aligns naturally with Konga’s long-term ambitions.

“Konga’s vision is to be the engine of trade and commerce in Africa, and foreign exchange liquidity is the fuel that powers that engine. Stabyl’s infrastructure is critical to bring Konga’s vision to reality,” he said.

Although Stabyl is initially focused on the NGN/USD corridor, the company has outlined plans to expand into additional African currency pairs as regulatory approvals are secured, positioning itself to become a foundational layer for the continent’s next generation of institutional financial infrastructure.