Flutterwave, widely viewed as Africa’s top payments infrastructure provider, said it has secured a strategic investment from Ripple, the company behind blockchain-based enterprise services used across both traditional and digital finance. The deal signals what Flutterwave describes as the next step in its long-running plan to build stablecoin functionality into cross-border settlement, linking its existing capabilities for international transfers with enterprise-ready digital liquidity.
Flutterwave framed the move as part of a broader effort to strengthen Africa’s role in global digital-asset trading, arguing that placing the infrastructure in the region can help companies sidestep frictions tied to legacy payment rails. The company said the funding is tied to its Series E round, valuing Flutterwave at $3.2 billion, and pointed to what it calls strong institutional confidence based on its financial position and longer-term value proposition.
The investment also reflects a multi-year roadmap Flutterwave says it has been executing step by step, including integrating stablecoin-enabled settlement, liquidity, and remittance pathways. As part of the next phase, the company plans to embed RLUSD throughout its core ecosystem, aiming to finalize a “stablecoin-first” payment setup designed to reduce bottlenecks that have historically slowed or complicated international transactions. Flutterwave said the resulting liquidity framework is intended to be consistent, scalable, and compliant, changing how African businesses connect to global markets by making digital money acceptance both borderless and rooted locally.
Under the partnership, Ripple and Flutterwave are focused on product integration meant to speed up adoption of digital-asset infrastructure across the region, delivering what they describe as faster settlement, improved liquidity, and lower cross-border costs. The collaboration is organized around three main components: first, putting RLUSD into Flutterwave’s payment rails and into the Send App remittance routes as the settlement asset for high-volume use cases; second, using the XRP Ledger, or XRPL, to support quicker transaction clearing; and third, deploying a single API layer that connects Flutterwave’s domestic network with Ripple Payments, Ripple’s global payments network.
Both firms say the combined architecture is designed to blend familiar fiat payment methods—such as local cards, mobile wallets, and bank transfers—with Ripple’s enterprise blockchain technology. In their view, that blend helps remove common pain points in African cross-border payments, including multi-day settlement delays and wider foreign-exchange margins. The intended end result is “guaranteed liquidity,” pricing that is more predictable, and settlement that can happen in real time.
Reece Merrick, managing director for MEA at Ripple, said Flutterwave has built a highly advanced payments network in Africa and that stablecoins are becoming central as the platform evolves. He added that Ripple’s investment is meant to place RLUSD inside that infrastructure, with Flutterwave moving stablecoin flows over XRPL and expanding its role as a settlement layer for real-world payments across the continent. Merrick said the companies also plan to bring Ripple Payments’ speed and efficiency to cross-border transactions in the region, with the goal of enabling faster, lower-cost financial services for businesses and consumers at scale.
Olugbenga “GB” Agboola, founder and chief executive of Flutterwave, said the investment is a pivotal point in the company’s development, allowing it to scale its infrastructure and broaden its stablecoin-enabled payments roadmap. He said faster settlement and lower-cost cross-border payments are intended to create a “payment superhighway” linking African commerce directly to the global economy, calling the partnership a catalyst for Nigerian and broader African sovereignty in the digital financial era by ensuring local markets remain major participants in the global digital-asset shift.
With the new capital and a deeper product alliance, Flutterwave said it will accelerate its objective of bridging conventional financial systems with next-generation digital-asset infrastructure. The company noted it has already raised more than $500 million and processed over a billion transactions totaling more than $50 billion, positioning it—according to its own assessment—to unlock larger economic benefits for small and medium-sized enterprises as well as global businesses operating across Africa.
