Payd, a Kenyan payments startup, plans to resume its services on Friday after foreign exchange (FX) losses left it short of the funds needed to meet some customer balances, forcing it to pause payouts around May and overhaul its treasury system.
Founded in 2023 by Benaiah Wepundi, Payd enables freelancers, contractors, and businesses to receive international payments and convert them into local currencies. As of February, Payd said it served about 30,000 users across Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and Senegal.
Payd’s experience highlights one of the less visible risks in Africa’s cross-border payments market: a fintech can generate millions of dollars in payouts while still losing money if it fails to properly match the currencies, timing, and cost of the funds moving through its system.
Payd has denied shutting down after its services stopped working, leaving customers unable to complete some transfers and questioning the company’s silence over the disruption. Posts from customers on X also raised concerns about failed or delayed transfers, with some saying the service stopped working without a clear explanation.
The company plans to restart services across its app, WhatsApp chatbot, business platform, and application programming interface (API) on Friday, September 18, Wepundi told TechCabal in an interview on Wednesday.
“Ahead of the restart, users will be able to track their existing balances and choose the accounts into which settlements will be paid,” Wepundi said.
But the restart follows months in which Payd’s rapid growth exposed weaknesses in its treasury controls. The company’s monthly payment volume rose from about $500,000 in September 2025 to more than $3 million in April and May 2026, according to Wepundi. During that period, Payd expanded to 52 currencies at its peak, then cut to 35 and now plans to reduce it further to 13. It relied heavily on US dollars for incoming payments and local currencies for customer payouts.
The company did not adequately account for the cost of maintaining those local currency obligations as exchange rates moved, Wepundi said. By the time Payd understood the full extent of the problem, the accumulated FX losses had affected the funds available to cover some customer balances.
“At times, the dollar cost of making those payouts was higher than the dollar amount received to fund them,” Wepundi said. “We didn’t accurately track these changes across the rates we offered on the platform and the rates our providers offered.”
“The treasury model we used did not fully account for changes in USD to local currency between pre-funding and payout and the conversion prices charged by our payment partners. Funds for payments were managed in a shared pool across US dollar and local-currency accounts. Most incoming payments were in dollars, while many payouts were in local currencies.”
A $100 payment could be prefunded at an exchange rate of $1 to 10 units of local currency, only for the customer to withdraw five days later when the rate had moved to 1$ to 13 units of the same local currency. Payd would then need to provide more local currency than it had originally set aside. Across multiple currencies, payout dates, and provider-specific rates, the company lacked a sufficiently precise system for tracking those exposures, Wepundi said.
“Our monitoring did not identify the full effect of the losses early enough. We take responsibility for that.” Wepundi said.
From growth to a payout crunch
Payd’s payout problems became visible to customers in May, when Payd paused some payouts. Two customers told TechCabal at the time that they couldn’t use Payd to make transfers to Nigeria. When one contacted the company, Payd attributed the disruption to “downtime on the app.”
Payd’s case puts it in a wider context for African fintechs whose business models depend on moving money between currencies and payment networks. Cross-border payments can look attractive because revenue grows with transaction volume. However, the economics also expose companies to liquidity, settlement, and FX risks between the moment money enters a system and the moment it leaves.
The Noah partnership in February enabled Payd to embed stablecoin-based payment rails. By March 2026, the company was marketing access to over 35 countries and described itself as a platform for “borderless” workers and businesses. According to its website, the company relies on licenced payment providers and virtual asset service providers (VASPs) for regulated financial services, rather than providing those services directly.
Payd had also reported strong growth. In January, Wepundi told Disrupt Africa that it reached break-even in September 2025 with average monthly recurring revenue (MRR) of about $10,000. In December, Wepundi said Payd had crossed $1 million in monthly transaction volume and targeted $10 million in monthly transaction volume and $300,000 in MRR over the next 12 months.
He said the business generated revenue from transaction fees, FX margins, and business-to-consumer (B2C) products such as APIs and bulk payments.
The subsequent rise in payment volume, however, increased the amount of money flowing through the system and, consequently, the error in its treasury model.
