Block-Owned TBD and Chipper Cash Partner on Cross-Border Payments in Africa

Block-owned TBD and African FinTech Chipper Cash partnered to facilitate B2C and B2B cross-border payments across 40 African countries.

Chipper Cash has integrated with TBD’s open messaging protocol, tbDEX, to power cross-border payments and decentralized identity use cases, the companies said in a Tuesday (May 14) press release.

“Across Africa, the challenges of currency liquidity and access to global financial systems are palpable,” TBD CEO Mike Brock said in the release. “For these reasons, we are laser-focused on building out the tbDEX ecosystem in Africa, which already includes Yellow Card, the largest and only licensed stablecoin on/off ramp on the African continent.”

The collaboration will initially focus on consumer remittances, aiming to make them faster and less expensive, according to the release.

“Remittances are a lifeline for many African families, but the costs of sending money to the continent remain among the highest globally,” Chipper Cash President and Co-founder Maijid Moujaled said in the release. “By plugging into an open protocol like tbDEX with numerous network participants, we believe we can, collectively as an industry, drive down these high costs and facilitate remittances in a more efficient, transparent and compliant manner.”

In addition to remittances, TBD and Chipper Cash will also explore ways to empower small businesses, adding to Chipper Cash’s offerings that already enable local and cross-border digital payments for underbanked small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) across 40 African countries, the release said.

Chipper Cash will also use tbDEX to accelerate the onboarding and identity verification of consumers and small businesses, per the release. It will do so with verifiable credentials and decentralized identifiers to enable trusted, compliant transactions.

Decentralized identity aims to provide a foundational technology that allows platforms, wallet providers, identity vendors, governments and authoritative issuers to create secure digital identities that can be used across various digital use cases, Brock told PYMNTS in an interview posted in November.

“We never really thought about, what does it mean to identify a person on the internet in a way that is portable and doesn’t require you to rely on a single private platform,” Brock said.