The intelligence layer for SADC cross-border payments.
South Africa into the rest of SADC is where the bottleneck is. South Africa has deep banking infrastructure; most of the region receives on mobile money, through a different dominant operator in each country. This is what obliges you, who will onboard you, and which rail actually reaches a person at the other end.
Built by applying to providers as an ordinary company and recording what they say back, by sending the same amount by more than one route on the same morning and measuring what landed, and by reading the instruments that oblige a firm on each leg. The method is public, including what gets withheld.
A payments company can spend years discovering which relationships need to exist in a market and why. That discovery is research, and research can be done once and read by everyone. This is that research, in the open.
- Corridors
- 3
- Providers assessed
- 1
- Access outcomes
- 1
- Measurements
- 0
Small, and shown anyway. Every one of these numbers required somebody to apply, be answered, or move real money — which is why nobody publishes them.
Latest finding
our own application · ZA → global stacks ·
We asked a major settlement stack whether it reaches Africa. Twenty-six days later, no answer.
Its published coverage names SEPA, FPS, ACH and Fedwire, then defers everything else to the integration team. So we asked the integration team directly. The silence is the finding.
Who will actually onboard you
10 providers approached by one South African company. Not one declined because the corridor was unavailable.
Every refusal was a threshold the applicant could not clear. The infrastructure exists, documents these markets as covered, and is not reachable by an entrant that does not already hold a licence, a volume history, or an entity in the right jurisdiction.
- refused
- 4
- untested
- 1
- no response
- 1
- pending
- 4
The grounds actually given
- Insufficient transaction volume history
- No operating entity in the required jurisdiction
- A licence the applicant does not yet hold, because the provider relies on the applicant's compliance process
- Enterprise-grade onboarding documentation, including banking history
- A commercial partnership scoped before technical access is granted
Which provider gave which ground is published in full while the register is open. It is the part that cannot be obtained any other way than by applying and being answered, and for these first few iterations it is free to read.
Entering a market
Six steps between deciding to enter a market and being able to move money in it. Three are answerable from published sources and are free here. The fourth — who will actually onboard a company like yours — exists nowhere public, because a provider does not publish who it turned away.
Obligation maps
What obliges a firm moving value on a corridor, with the instrument and the source against each. Free, permanently addressed, and never gated.
- EU → ZA4 obligations · 2 changes · crypto settled value
- NG → NA, ZM, BW, ZW0 obligations · 2 changes · refined petroleum
No obligation basis established from any source reviewed — which is the finding.
Cost under measurement
- ZA → ZW0 assessed · 0 access · 0 measured
- ZA → ZM0 assessed · 0 access · 0 measured
- ZA → global stacks1 assessed · 1 access · 0 measured
Tell me your corridor and what you are deciding.
You will get a scope, a delivery date and a figure in the same reply — not a discovery call. Named providers, the grounds each gave, which rail reaches your recipients, and what the route costs measured rather than quoted.