Africa’s financial infrastructure is still split across banks, mobile money, wallets, and emerging blockchain systems. One startup is now trying to stitch it all into a single layer.
Tulupay has announced the prelaunch of its Financial Operating System (FOS), a unified infrastructure it says is designed to connect traditional banking systems with digital wallets, mobile money, stablecoins, blockchain networks, and even central bank digital currencies. You can get the full report here.
At the centre of the pitch is interoperability. Instead of building another fintech app, Tulupay is positioning itself as the layer where different financial systems can finally talk to each other through a single API structure.
The company says the system will support payments, remittances, trading, capital raising, and investment flows across individuals, businesses, and institutions.
The bigger problem it is targeting is already familiar in African finance. Cross-border payments remain slow, expensive, and fragmented, with different countries operating incompatible systems that rarely scale across borders.
Tulupay’s approach is to collapse those silos into one infrastructure layer that handles identity, compliance, settlement, and asset movement in real time.
Key parts of the system include identity verification tools, payment switching infrastructure, trade settlement gateways, multi-asset wallets, and tokenization rails that can handle both fiat and digital assets.
The company is also leaning heavily on compliance and regulation, positioning itself as infrastructure that can plug directly into regulators rather than bypass them.
That framing matters. Across the continent, the push for financial interoperability has been growing, but execution has always lagged behind ambition. Most systems still operate in isolation.
Tulupay is betting that the next phase of African fintech will not be another wallet or payment app, but the infrastructure layer underneath them.
Whether that vision scales will depend less on the technology itself and more on how quickly fragmented financial ecosystems are willing to converge.
