Elizabeth Rossiello is an American entrepreneur who founded BitPesa in 2013, one of the earliest companies to use cryptocurrency for cross-border payments in Africa. Her journey from Wall Street analyst to Nairobi-based fintech founder - and her landmark legal battle with Safaricom over M-Pesa access - made her one of the most consequential and controversial figures in Silicon Savannah's fintech history.
Rossiello studied at Harvard and worked in investment banking and frontier market finance before moving to Nairobi in the early 2010s. Her experience with African financial markets gave her first-hand exposure to the pain of cross-border payments: sending money into or out of Kenya involved fees of 9 to 12 percent, multiple intermediary banks, settlement times measured in days, and foreign exchange spreads that added further costs. Bitcoin, with its borderless, near-instant settlement capability, offered a potential bypass of the entire correspondent banking system.
BitPesa launched as a consumer remittance service - users could send money from the UK to Kenya using Bitcoin as a settlement rail, with recipients receiving Kenyan shillings via M-Pesa. The model was elegant in theory: convert British pounds to Bitcoin, transmit instantly across borders, convert to shillings at the destination. In practice, it collided with Kenya's financial establishment. In 2015, Safaricom suspended BitPesa's access to the M-Pesa API, citing anti-money laundering concerns related to cryptocurrency. Rossiello sued, arguing that Safaricom was abusing its dominant market position to crush a competitor.
The case became a defining moment in African fintech regulation. It raised fundamental questions about platform power - whether Safaricom, as the monopoly provider of mobile money infrastructure, could unilaterally deny access to companies it viewed as competitive threats. Rossiello argued that M-Pesa was effectively a public utility and that Safaricom's gatekeeping power was anti-competitive. The Competition Authority of Kenya and the courts ultimately did not rule in BitPesa's favour on the injunction, but the case drew international attention and influenced ongoing regulatory discussions about platform neutrality.
After the M-Pesa suspension, Rossiello pivoted BitPesa from consumer remittances to B2B foreign exchange and treasury management - a less visible but commercially viable market. The company processed over $2 billion annually in cross-border transactions for businesses, NGOs, and financial institutions. In 2021, Rossiello rebranded the company as AZA Finance, reflecting its evolution from a cryptocurrency-native startup to a regulated financial infrastructure provider.
Rossiello raised approximately $25 million from investors including Greycroft Partners, Draper Associates, and Future Africa. Her fundraising success was notable given the headwinds - regulatory opposition, the M-Pesa conflict, and the general scepticism toward cryptocurrency-based businesses in African markets. She built AZA Finance into a company that operated across multiple African corridors, processing payments between currencies that international banks considered too small or too risky to handle.
Rossiello's legacy in Kenyan fintech extends beyond her company. The BitPesa-Safaricom conflict permanently changed how the ecosystem thought about platform dependency, mobile money monopoly, and the risks of building businesses entirely on infrastructure controlled by a single corporation.
See Also
Sources
- Kuo, Lily. "A Bitcoin Startup Sued Kenya's Biggest Company and Lost - But May Have Won the War." Quartz Africa, 2016.
- Bright, Jake. "BitPesa Is Taking On Africa's Cross-Border Payment Problem with Bitcoin." TechCrunch, 2015.
- Adegoke, Yinka. "BitPesa Rebrands to AZA Finance." Rest of World, 2021.
- Kene-Okafor, Tage. "Elizabeth Rossiello on Building Cross-Border Payments in Africa." TechCrunch, 2022.