Cut Through the Noise. Master the New Economy.

Dr. Tonya M. Evans: A quick ask before we dive in, especially if this is your first time: we're building something real here, and I want to reach as many people as possible who are trying — like you — to separate fact from fiction so you can make good decisions in this new economy safely, legally, and confidently. Because despite the name, this show was never just about digital assets. It's your entire guide to crypto, artificial intelligence, intellectual property, and Web3, and the policy shaping all four. If today's episode gives you something worth keeping, hit subscribe, leave a five-star rating, and send it to the business owner in your circle who has ever gotten burned by a slow, expensive, cross-border payment. And head right now to ConfidentlyCrypto.com for the full transcript, glossary, this week's listener poll, and the rest of our show resources.

Today we have a very special guest, Ebenezer Ghanney, who goes by Eben. He's the Ghanaian fintech leader with years of experience in foreign exchange and financial technology — and as co-founder and CEO of WeWire, he's built a global infrastructure for cross-border B2B payments, navigating complex regulatory environments across Africa and the Middle East. He holds a degree in accounting from the University of Professional Studies in Accra and is a certified securities analyst through the Ghana Stock Exchange. He's also become one of the more active voices in African fintech, regularly showing up on panels and at industry events to champion the sector's growth. Eben, welcome to Confidently Crypto & More.

Eben Ghanney: Thank you for having me.

Dr. Tonya M. Evans: It's excellent to connect with you. I know we met last year at DASA 2025, and we have a lot of friends and colleagues within our circle. As vast as the technology is, I think we're using technology and relationship as a real advantage to connect. I want to dive right in: what's the actual tipping point that made you decide to build WeWire instead of just talking about the problem?

Eben Ghanney: Happy to be here. Let me step back and explain what Yellow Card was doing at the time and why the switch happened for me. For listeners who don't know, Yellow Card is a Pan-African crypto exchange. At least at the time I was there, it was set up by an American who saw someone go to a shop and pay about 12% to send roughly $200 back home. He thought about that: why is technology like Bitcoin not being used to transmit money across borders? At the time there was no craze about stablecoins, so Bitcoin was the technological infrastructure he saw as a way to help solve that problem.

I was brought in to build Yellow Card's Ghana operations — the first employee on the ground, coming in as country operations manager. I built the business from zero to about 150,000 users, transacting about $20 million month on month when I left. My time there exposed me to a bigger problem: I saw retail users coming on the application, but the volumes they were doing were not retail-like. I couldn't explain why a retail person was buying $100,000, $200,000 worth of Bitcoin day after day. In my quest to understand the user experience, I realized most of these individuals were proxies for businesses that wanted to move money out — businesses that wanted to make purchases, pay suppliers, and couldn't get the liquidity they wanted in the banking system. So they found their way into the crypto market: buy Bitcoin, convert it out of the market into another fiat currency at the other side, and use it.

So I asked: how do I aggregate and solve this problem? WeWire started by aggregating that volume — then the question kept coming up: is this the most efficient way for these businesses to get money out? Because most of the businesses we spoke to were going to convert at the other side to another fiat currency anyway. The insight for me was that people didn't really care about the technology used to transmit the money. What they cared about was: I want to pay my supplier, and I need my supplier to get dollars at the other end. So in 2022 I decided to branch out and build WeWire as a B2B cross-border payments company — helping businesses move money across borders by orchestrating the complexity of the rails away. The business deposits their home currency, and their supplier gets the recipient currency, whilst we handle the mess in the background as a middleware service. And I think my thesis at the time has been proven correct, because last year Yellow Card shut down retail totally and is in the B2B space now.

Dr. Tonya M. Evans: So important to focus at the B2B level. When users are engaged, they're clicking send — they're not necessarily interested in the plumbing. But when you start moving out of smaller, more insular communities and circles to fully and substantially engage in commerce — not just where you are locally but globally — it takes the type of technology you've built. And you're not just in the digital assets space. There's this entire rich and complex yet simple monetary system underneath with mobile money. Talk about that for international audiences, and how the existing Momo infrastructure ushered in this new world with digital assets on top.

Eben Ghanney: I'll premise by saying this: I always tell my team and counterparties that what we're building is Web 2.5 — the intersection between Web2 and Web3. We have the traditional rails, which were quite important to us. For a very long time we didn't even consider ourselves — and still today we don't consider ourselves — a crypto company. We are just a bridge, assessing the best qualities of the Web3 world to make the Web2 world more efficient.

You talk about mobile money — going back to stablecoins, which is a digital form of money: Momo is also a digital form of money, and it has been in Africa for the past 15 years. Today most businesses use mobile money payments as a way of collection and of paying employees, because there's not much difference between stablecoins and Momo. The major difference is that a stablecoin lives on a public ledger — a blockchain — and Momo is a closed-loop ledger system that sits with the telco issuing it. At the fundamental level, they are both e-money: both have underlying actual bank deposits backing them. In Momo, the biggest players in Africa are M-Pesa in Kenya and, in Ghana, MTN; in Francophone Africa there's Orange Money. Momo works like this: you deposit your physical cash, the telco issues you a digital form of the money backed one-for-one, and you move value wallet to wallet. Similarly, the stablecoins we use to power our cross-border payments today — USDC issued by Circle, or USDT issued by Tether, the most popular in the space — are fundamentally the same thing. It's just about tuning the messaging so the leap from Momo to stablecoins is explained well — that it's effectively the same thing they're already doing, in a different format.

Dr. Tonya M. Evans: It's fascinating because you're far beyond the conversations to the implementation. Part of your work necessarily touches the regulatory footprint you've also developed across multiple jurisdictions. So for the risk or compliance officer listening who's never built something like this from scratch — what does the sequencing look like? Where does someone start?

Eben Ghanney: I'll share how we did it in phases. In 2022, when I decided to quit my job and focus on WeWire full time, we engaged a legal firm in Ghana first to do an overview of the market and the regulatory landscape and see where we fit. I drafted a document: this is exactly what we want to do as a business, this is where fiat comes in, this is where we move from fiat to stablecoin or crypto. They researched the space and came back saying you could potentially apply for PSP licenses, X, Y, Z — but at the end of the day, none of them fully covered what our operation was going to be. We are not a PSP doing collections and disbursements; we're effectively taking one currency and converting it to another, leveraging stablecoins or crypto in the mix — and that component is the crucial part of what we do.

So we expanded our search: which market can we go to and get licenses that fit? Canada had an MSB framework that fit perfectly for what we do. We got the Canadian MSB, and then businesses in Ghana and Nigeria contracted with the Canadian entity. Those businesses effectively do business with the Canadian entity — and the entities that pay local currency in their home country become collection agents, collecting and disbursing local currency on behalf of the Canadian licensed entity. That's how we got in framework-wise. Then we expanded the scope: which other license is strong enough to cover a lot of what we do? We found the Mauritius treasury licence — because effectively what we do is treasury management, treasury payments, invoice financing — and got that. Now we're in the process of getting an EMI FCA licence in the UK, and we just got into the Ghana SEC sandbox for trade tokenization, again building around the trade finance and payments aspects of what we do. It's always about figuring out what's available in the market; if it's not available, how do I go to another market whose licence can cover what I'm doing — not just operating blind.

Dr. Tonya M. Evans: Sandboxes are critically important. Not every country or system is perfect, but it seems there's forward progress now — certainly in Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa. How are those sandbox relationships working, and do you see value in them?

Eben Ghanney: Whether a market goes for a sandbox depends on how robust the financial ecosystem already is. The US hasn't gone the sandbox route because there's a very mature market — the CFTC and others — to draw parallel relationships from for managing the space. A lot of African markets don't have forward products or CFDs, the sophisticated options trading available in mature markets. So the jump from not having traditional leverage systems to having crypto markets already trading on leverage is too big — which is why they go the sandbox route: let's see first.

In the African space we've seen some sandboxes succeed and some that frankly haven't produced much output. Nigeria's SEC had its own sandbox — two companies admitted over two years ago, and there's been no public success story, no public findings, so as a market we don't know what happened. It's a black box. Then there's Ghana, where the sandbox is quite new: the regulators have shared APIs with us sandbox aspirants, we're integrating to share data both ways — from inception we pass data to them, and they learn from the data to make informed decisions for final guidelines toward a full licensing regime. So the path is: regulatory sandbox toward full licensing. The Central Bank of Nigeria recently started opening sandbox applications too, and Kenya is mostly heading straight to full licensing. Each market looks at what already exists and decides: is it worth jumping fully onto this new thing we don't understand, or do we take a gradual step — sandbox first, then licensing?

Dr. Tonya M. Evans: Understood — that puts things into great context. The final thing around the technology: you've talked about the African Continental Free Trade Area goals and interoperability. For listeners unfamiliar, at a high level, what is AfCFTA and what does it look like over the next one to two years?

Eben Ghanney: The free trade agreement is, simply put, trying to bridge African countries to come together to form a single market. Historically Africa has been broken into 54 different countries. For a company like WeWire set up in Ghana, if you want to go to Nigeria you have to register in Nigeria — set up everything from scratch, hire a different team on the ground. Every country you move to, you start from zero, and each market is different from the next. That complexity is what AfCFTA is trying to resolve: certain countries are good producers of oil — how do we all buy from that country? Another is a good producer of gold — how do we all buy from that country? So trade can move easily across the continent.

What has hindered faster acceleration is mostly infrastructure and governmental willpower. Trade doesn't move in thin air — it moves on infrastructure: road, rail, air, sea shipping. Different African countries are still building that infrastructure, and if it's not built concurrently with money movement, there'll always be trade imbalance, because trade moves where it's easier to move. There's still an absurdity where shipping a container from China to Africa is cheaper than shipping from one African country to another. It's an infrastructure problem — part of what AfCFTA is trying to solve. We've seen central banks start passporting licensing — Ghana and Rwanda, and conversations within East Africa around a single bloc. I think it's the way to go, how Europe built a single market. For us as entrepreneurs in Africa, it solves a huge problem: instead of services that sell to just 30 million people, I'd have services that sell into a billion people. Servicing a billion people today is painful because you have to go country by country — as opposed to someone in Europe servicing 450 million people from one single market.

Dr. Tonya M. Evans: Excellent. When I did my keynote at DASA 2025, part of my presentation focused on how I was the first in my family to set foot back on the continent since being taken from there — I didn't know who my people were, but by DASA 2026 I was going to know. I claimed Ghana, and Ghana embraced me. I've since learned I'm 100% Cameroonian on both sides of my family — specifically from the Tikar people, and also the Hausa people who migrated. So I still feel connected to Mother Ghana, but it gave me great pride to keep digging into my roots — so when you mentioned Cameroon, I thought it was a nod and a wink from the ancestors. Now, before we close out, I want to talk about DASA this year — WeWire is a partner. What does that partnership mean for you, and what do you hope regulators and delegates take away from WeWire's presence there?

Eben Ghanney: Our objective as a company has always been collaboration, because in this space, nobody solves the problems alone. From working with banks to working with other fintechs — I speak to a lot of stakeholders who ask, isn't that company your competitor? I say no: the problem is too big; we need to collaborate more than we compete. As part of what we're doing at DASA this year, we're even launching a hackathon: how do we empower more tech and fintech solutions to be built on top of the rails we're creating? I might not be able to go to Cameroon and solve Cameroon as well as a Cameroonian, but I might have the international rails — across Ghana, Nigeria, other markets — that a Cameroonian entity can step on and grow to the next stage, and another person can step on after them. That's why we're taking part in DASA: it's a way to meet the stakeholders in our environment — regulators, participants, competitors, and banks who feel like they're in their own silo while the fintech or crypto boys do their own thing somewhere. It's a way to show that this is an open field — like in sports, someone plays defense, someone plays midfield, someone plays attack, but together we form a team and solve the problem together. Last year WeWire took part in a small capacity; this year we're taking it up a notch.

Dr. Tonya M. Evans: That's totally consistent with what the visionary Peter Frimpong Manso focuses on this year — from policy to prosperity, and how we get there, especially as we usher in the 2.5 level between 2.0 and 3.0: what interoperability, collaboration, communication, and community look like. Without community and collaboration — particularly in this world, as we increasingly know we're all connected — the idea of going from policy to prosperity in a way that's more inclusive, and from a power center rather than purely being extractive, is really important. Finally: what one policy shift or focus is at the forefront of your mind for regulators?

Eben Ghanney: Regulators always need to keep an open mind. Sometimes regulators are too scared of the unknowns, and they tend to over-regulate or take stances that cripple innovation. Yes, there are unknowns and there are guardrails — but there are also financial markets you already control that you can draw parallels from. I always go back to Momo and stablecoins being effectively no different: one is built on a public blockchain, which is more transparent than one built on a closed-loop ledger system. Looking at it from that perspective, you first clear a lot of doubt and uncertainty — then you can go line item by line item and realize it wasn't as scary as the word made it sound. Which is why I don't even like the word "crypto" — anytime a regulator hears it, a notion is already formed in their head, and you have to convince them from that perspective. So: keep an open mind and listen to the whole scope of what everyone is doing in the space. Then they can differentiate what is allowable and what is not — and sometimes, if they open their mind, they realize they don't need new regulation. There's already a framework; just draw insights from it to regulate this space.

Dr. Tonya M. Evans: Yes — this idea of creating regulations and laws in the absence of the technology that solved for the same issues, challenges, and concerns — that is the sweet spot, my friend. I'll do my level best to shout that from the rooftops when I'm there. Where can people find WeWire and follow what you're building next?

Eben Ghanney: Simply wewire.com. You can find us there and on every social media — @usewire on X, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

Dr. Tonya M. Evans: Excellent — we'll share all of that in the show notes and at ConfidentlyCrypto.com. Eben, thank you for this. I want listeners to walk away with this: the infrastructure question and the regulatory question are not two separate conversations. If you're building, investing in, or advising a business that touches cross-border payments or digital assets anywhere on the continent and beyond, the compliance groundwork is the next opportunity — not a heavy tax on it. It's integral. Be sure to head to ConfidentlyCrypto.com for the full transcript of this conversation, the glossary of terms we used today, this week's listener poll, and the rest of our show resources, including our bookshelf. If you haven't already, subscribe to Confidently Crypto & More wherever you listen to podcasts, and leave that five-star review. Share this episode with the business owner, the advisor, the regulator who needs to hear how this actually gets built around the world. Eben, any final comments before we head out?

Eben Ghanney: Thank you for having me, and thanks for the good work you're doing educating the public. I hope this has been insightful. If there's a need for more conversations, do reach out — and you can also head to wewire.com/blogs to read more insights around the space. Thank you.

Dr. Tonya M. Evans: Excellent. Thank you so much, Eben. I'm Dr. Tonya Evans. Until next time — stay informed, stay prepared, and stay confidently crypto & more.