BitPesa was a Nairobi-based cryptocurrency and cross-border payments company founded in 2013 by Elizabeth Rossiello, an American financial analyst who had worked in investment banking and microfinance across Africa. BitPesa was one of the earliest attempts to use Bitcoin as infrastructure for African cross-border payments, and its turbulent history - including a landmark legal battle with the Central Bank of Kenya - made it one of the most consequential and controversial companies in the Silicon Savannah story.
Rossiello's founding insight came from her experience working in frontier markets: sending money into and out of African countries was prohibitively expensive, with remittance fees averaging 9 to 12 percent and foreign exchange spreads adding further costs. Traditional correspondent banking relationships were slow, opaque, and often required multiple intermediary banks. BitPesa proposed using Bitcoin as a settlement rail - converting sender currency to Bitcoin, transmitting it instantly across borders, and converting it to local currency at the destination. The approach bypassed the correspondent banking system entirely, reducing costs and settlement times from days to hours.
The company launched its first product allowing users to send money from the UK to Kenya using Bitcoin, with recipients receiving Kenyan shillings via M-Pesa. This required integration with Safaricom's M-Pesa API, which BitPesa secured through a partnership with a licensed paybill operator. But in 2015, Safaricom suspended BitPesa's access to M-Pesa, citing concerns about cryptocurrency-related money laundering and regulatory uncertainty. BitPesa sued Safaricom, arguing that the suspension was anti-competitive and designed to protect Safaricom's own international remittance business. The case, heard by the Competition Authority of Kenya and the High Court, became a landmark in African fintech regulation - testing whether a dominant telco could unilaterally deny platform access to a competitor.
BitPesa lost the initial injunction but the case drew international attention to the power dynamics between African mobile money monopolies and the startups building on their platforms. The episode exposed a structural vulnerability in Kenya's fintech ecosystem: companies that depended on M-Pesa for payment infrastructure could be shut down at Safaricom's discretion, creating an existential risk for any business built on mobile money rails.
After the M-Pesa suspension, BitPesa pivoted from consumer remittances to B2B foreign exchange and treasury management services. The company rebranded as AZA Finance in 2021, reflecting its evolution from a Bitcoin company to a broader cross-border payments platform serving businesses, NGOs, and financial institutions. AZA Finance processed over $2 billion in transactions annually across multiple African corridors and raised approximately $25 million in equity funding from investors including Greycroft Partners, Draper Associates, and Future Africa.
Rossiello's journey from Bitcoin evangelist to enterprise FX provider traced the broader maturation of African fintech - from idealistic disruption narratives toward the harder, less glamorous work of building regulated financial infrastructure. BitPesa's legal battle with Safaricom also left a lasting mark on Kenyan tech policy, contributing to discussions about platform neutrality and the obligations of dominant infrastructure providers.
See Also
Sources
- Bright, Jake. "BitPesa Is Taking On Africa's Cross-Border Payment Problem with Bitcoin." TechCrunch, 2015.
- Kuo, Lily. "A Bitcoin Startup Sued Kenya's Biggest Company and Lost - But May Have Won the War." Quartz Africa, 2016.
- Adegoke, Yinka. "BitPesa Rebrands to AZA Finance, Reflecting Its Shift from Crypto to Enterprise FX." Rest of World, 2021.
- Kene-Okafor, Tage. "AZA Finance: How BitPesa Evolved from Bitcoin Startup to Africa's B2B FX Platform." TechCrunch, 2022.