Grey, the Y Combinator-backed cross-border payments platform, is closing a gap that’s quietly annoyed its users in two of its fastest-growing markets. The company announced this week that customers in Ghana and Kenya can now fund their Grey accounts directly in local currency — Ghanaian cedis (GHS) and Kenyan shillings (KES) — via bank transfer or mobile money, rather than routing through a separate platform first.
It sounds like a small feature. In practice, it removes a step that’s been baked into the user experience since Grey expanded into East and West Africa: to get money into a USD, GBP, or EUR-denominated Grey account, users in Ghana and Kenya often had to first move funds through another app or exchange service, then bring the converted balance over. That extra hop added friction, fees, and time — the exact things a platform built around moving money globally is supposed to eliminate.
“Cross-border payments should not begin with friction”
Grey co-founder and CEO Idorenyin Obong framed the launch as a direct response to that gap, noting that many users in Ghana and Kenya already relied on Grey to receive and manage international money but had to take extra steps outside the platform just to fund their accounts in the first place. Local currency deposits, he said, are meant to remove that barrier and connect local financial systems more directly to the global economy.
The feature lets users move cedis or shillings into their Grey balance through the same rails they already use day to day — bank transfers and mobile money — rather than requiring a card, a third-party wallet, or a manual over-the-counter exchange.
Why Ghana and Kenya, and why now
Both markets are core to Grey’s growth strategy. The company, founded in Lagos in 2020 as Aboki Africa before rebranding, picked Kenya as its East African hub in 2023, drawn by strong remittance inflows that made up more than 3% of the country’s GDP. Ghana has followed a similar trajectory as one of Grey’s fastest-expanding West African markets outside its Nigerian home base.
Grey now says it serves more than 3 million users across over 50 countries, with payouts reaching more than 170 destinations. The platform’s core offering — multi-currency accounts in USD, GBP, and EUR, plus international transfers and virtual cards for global spending — has increasingly needed a stronger on-ramp from local currencies to match the strength of its off-ramp into global ones. Local currency deposits in Ghana and Kenya are the company’s latest move to close that loop, following earlier expansions into Latin America and Southeast Asia.
The bigger picture
Grey operates as a regulated money services business under FINTRAC in Canada and FinCEN in the United States, giving it the compliance footing to expand deposit rails market by market rather than launching everywhere at once. That market-by-market approach — Nigeria first, then Kenya, now deeper integration in both Kenya and Ghana — reflects a broader pattern among African fintechs: growth increasingly comes not from adding new countries, but from removing friction in the ones where a user base already exists.
For a company competing with the likes of Chipper Cash, Wise, and a growing field of African neobanks for the attention of digital nomads, freelancers, and remittance recipients, cutting even one step out of the funding process could be the difference between a user staying on-platform and reaching for a workaround.
