Afridigest Executive Brief: Remittances, retail, and regulatory wins

Strategic Intelligence for Senior Executives | Week 37: Sep 7-13, 2025

Sep 15, 2025

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The Afridigest Executive Brief delivers essential intelligence to busy executives.

A summary of this week’s key trends:

• Remittances — Diaspora fintech finding scale with companies like Kredete pioneering new approaches

• Retail — Walmart’s impending South African entry signals renewed confidence in African markets despite global headwinds

• Regulatory wins — From South Africa's e-hailing formalization to Nigeria's FX reforms, policy clarity is unlocking business opportunities

Deal of the Week

🇳🇬 Kredete, a Nigerian/American stablecoin-powered remittance & credit-building platform, raised a $22M Series A co-led by AfricInvest (via CAIF & FIVE) and Partech, with participation from Polymorphic Capital.

The round will fund the company’s geographic expansion (into Canada, the UK, and Europe) and the rollout of additional products.

About Kredete: Launched in late 2022, Kredete got its start as a B2B digital lending marketplace. (It first appeared in Afridigest in Week 14 2023,)

It has since evolved from solving credit infrastructure challenges to addressing two key problems the African diaspora faces: costly remittances and accessing credit. The company combines cross-border money transfers with a proprietary credit-building engine, enabling users to send money to over 30 African countries while improving their credit history in the US.

Having grown from “over 300,000 users” at the time of its $2.25M seed round in 2024 to over 700,000 monthly users and $500M facilitated since launch, Kredete says it’s now “building the continent’s largest aggregation layer of banks and wallets” (in the same vein as Onafriq & others) to give businesses a single API for real-time Africa payouts.

The founder’s journey: Adedewe’s path spans a decade of understanding financial exclusion across two continents. Over the course of migrating to the US, earning graduate degrees from Harvard (MBA) and the City University of New York (MSc), and working at KPMG and JP Morgan, he built and sold two startups — including selling employee engagement platform Telleso to WeWork, according to early investor Launch Africa Ventures.

He then identified the core problem he wanted to solve next: “I never knew my credit score before I left Nigeria.” This led to partnering with credit bureaus and building Kredete 1.0 before expanding globally to serve the diaspora.

Key personalities:

Adeola Adedewe, Founder and CEO
Hakeem Oriola, Chief Technology Officer
Khaled Ben Jilani, Senior Partner at AfricInvest
Lewam Kefela, Principal at Partech

In the Founder’s words: “Our vision is simple: if you support your family financially, that should count toward your creditworthiness. We're building a system that rewards financial responsibility across borders. This raise is about scaling that infrastructure globally — and making sure that the millions of Africans abroad are finally seen, scored, and served.” — Adeola Adedewe

In the Investors’ words:

“Kredete has been focusing on serving the African diaspora while addressing the key bottlenecks faced by payment operators when they move money in and out of Africa. It is one of those extremely rare start-ups that has managed to solve several problems at once...” — Khaled Ben Jilani, Senior Partner at AfricInvest
“Adeola and his team are driving transformative innovation in remittance and cross-border payment infrastructure…” — Lewam Kefela, Principal at Partech

3 reasons this matters:

Kredete represents a unique “reverse innovation” model — first solving credit infrastructure challenges in Africa, then applying earned insights to serve the global diaspora. (See also: Zipline.)
The company is pioneering a new category by turning routine remittances into credit-building opportunities for African immigrants (reminiscent of what Esusu did with rent payments).
Its dual-market approach, serving both underbanked users in African markets and underserved African immigrants in the US, bridges financial services gaps on both continents — and it’s increasingly positioning itself as the financial platform bridging the continent and the global African diaspora.