Juicyway: Re-imagining Cross-Border Payments and Currency Orchestration for Emerging Market Economies

Introduction

Africa's potential to thrive in the global economy is immense, but inefficiencies in cross-border payments hinder its progress. Despite hundreds of millions of dollars being raised by African startups to tackle cross-border payments, the problem has often been approached in ways that make it seem like a tarpit—complex, unyielding, and nearly impossible to solve. This persistent issue underscores a critical insight: cross-border payments in Africa are fundamentally a design problem. Addressing these barriers is critical to unlocking the continent's economic potential.

Challenges like limited foreign currency access, fragmented financial systems, and high remittance costs create barriers for individuals and businesses. Juicyway was founded to solve these issues and help Africans transact globally with ease through an exchange that uses deep liquidity and practical payment solutions.

To increase African currency participation in the global currency markets, this white paper presents:

1. A comparative analysis of the current cross-border payment landscape versus our proposed system.
2. Flowcharts that visually depict these payment flows.
3. A narrative that underscores why our approach represents a transformative step forward.
4. Real-life examples and data supporting our rationale and model.

The Problem: Status Quo in Cross-Border Payments

Pain Points: Disconnection Between Supply and Demand

At the heart of Africa’s cross-border payment challenges lies a fundamental problem: the lack of orchestration mechanisms to match foreign currency supply with demand in a seamless, real-time manner. Europe and the USA have deep and efficient foreign exchange markets, processing over $6.6 trillion daily, compared to Africa's fragmented systems handling less than 5% of this volume. In Asia, similar liquidity depth has enabled robust financial systems, while Africa lags with high fees, delays, and limited access. Only 4% of African banks and financial institutions participate in deep liquidity markets, compared to over 80% in developed regions. This limited participation stifles innovation and economic growth. However, technology presents a transformative opportunity to replicate and adapt these efficient structures in Africa, laying the foundation for financial inclusion and global competitiveness.

The Broken Supply Chain

1. Supply Sources:
2. • Businesses and individuals in Western markets send remittances, Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), Foreign Portfolio Investment (FPI), or subsidiary allocations into Africa.
   • African businesses earning foreign currency through exports, grants, or global trading activities struggle to channel this supply effectively into local markets.
   • Remittance companies lack a platform to competitively price FX conversions and efficiently disburse in local currencies.
   • Market makers seeking arbitrage opportunities face fragmented and opaque systems.
3. Demand Sources:
4. • Businesses with global operations require foreign currency for imports, international bills, and repatriation needs.
   • Individuals making global payments for education, healthcare, or travel face high costs and delayed access to foreign currencies.
   • Market makers looking to capitalize on demand often encounter misaligned liquidity timing.

Inefficiencies of the Status Quo:

• Mismatch of Supply and Demand: Supply flows into African markets asynchronously, creating delays and volatility in availability.
• High Costs: Over-reliance on intermediaries inflates transaction fees to 8-10%.
• Slow Settlement: Payment processing takes 2-5 days, hindering global competitiveness.
• Excessive Counterparty Risk: OTCs, Fintechs and Banks acting as sole counterparties expose themselves to high working capital demands, increasing systemic fragility and shooting up costs.

Illustrates the inefficiencies in traditional remittance, off-ramp systems, slow settlement processes, and fragmented liquidity pools

Current Models: Broken from Three Standpoints

1. Remittance

Traditional remittance companies are inefficient:

1. They collect from the West and sell USD floats to African banks.
2. Banks then distribute this float to local customers making outbound payments in local currency.
3. This multi-step process takes 4 days to 1 week due to slow settlement systems and intermediary delays.
4. The fragmented market creates misaligned supply and demand, leading to inflated costs and inefficiencies.

Solution:

Stablecoins and crypto simplify settlement by bypassing traditional intermediaries, significantly reducing costs. By settling transactions on a platform like Juicyway, supply meets demand in real time, eliminating delays.

2. Contribution to Local Supply

Local on/offramps are poorly developed, and dorm accounts are inefficient. This makes it difficult for businesses and individuals earning foreign currencies to contribute to local liquidity on their terms.

Solution:

Juicyway provides accessible quasi-banking and crypto wallet services, enabling seamless deposits and withdrawals. Our app ensures that locally-earned foreign currency directly supports the liquidity pool, bridging supply gaps.

3. Compliance and Payment Freeze-Outs

Africans face high costs of compliance and liquidity on accounts and card-issuing platforms because these platforms often act as primary counterparties. This model fails to reflect true market dynamics, driving up fees and limiting accessibility.

Solution:

With best-in-class compliance led by experts like Josh Wasserman (formerly of CashApp/Block), Juicyway ensures robust regulatory adherence. This provides secure, cost-effective, and interoperable payment rails for Africans globally.

Our Full Solution: Juicyway’s Orchestrated Liquidity Model

Juicyway addresses these systemic flaws by implementing a marketplace that directly matches supply with demand in near real-time, a capability that sets it apart from traditional systems. By eliminating intermediaries, it reduces delays and minimizes transaction costs. This ensures that liquidity flows efficiently, creating a truly seamless financial ecosystem that benefits both businesses and individuals. Our model ensures liquidity is available when and where it’s needed, at competitive pricing.

Incentivizing Liquidity Owners

In markets where liquidity is scarce, incentivizing the owners of liquidity to participate is critical. We understand that providing ease of injection and the ability for participants to set their own pricing are essential incentives. These principles are baked into our value proposition, ensuring liquidity providers find it both practical and rewarding to engage with our platform.

Core Innovations:

1. Dynamic Liquidity Pool:
2. • Supply Contributions:
   • • Diaspora remittances and corporate FDI/FPI flow directly into our platform.
     • Local businesses earning foreign currencies deposit into dedicated accounts or crypto wallets.
     • Remittance companies use our infrastructure to set competitive FX rates and ensure seamless local disbursements.
     • Market makers bring liquidity and arbitrage activity.
   • Demand Fulfillment:
   • • Businesses access foreign currencies for imports, global operations, and bill payments.
     • Individuals make instant global payments for travel, tuition, and e-commerce.
     • Market makers optimize liquidity deployment across regional currency pairs.
3. Stablecoin Integration: Stablecoins act as a bridge, facilitating instantaneous settlement and reducing reliance on volatile local currencies. However, they are a contributor to liquidity, not the sole mechanism.
4. Real-Time Matching: Our orchestration engine ensures near-instantaneous alignment of supply and demand, avoiding costly delays or mismatches.
5. Risk Mitigation: Juicyway does not act as the primary counterparty. Instead, we create a transparent ecosystem where participants (indirectly) interact, reducing working capital exposure.

Demonstrates Juicyway’s streamlined liquidity orchestration, reducing delays and transaction costs.

Real-Life Example:

A Ghanaian exporter sells cocoa beans to a European buyer. Traditionally, after receiving USD in the bank, the exporter waits for intermediaries (sometimes provided by the bank) to convert foreign currency at unfavourable rates. Using Juicyway, the exporter get paid the proceeds into their foreign currency account, contributing to local supply. Simultaneously, a Nigerian business needing USD for machinery imports taps into this supply via the Juicyway platform. Both parties transact seamlessly without knowing each other, bypassing intermediaries.

Real-Life Impact of Poor Orchestration

One of our customers provides a vivid and painful example of how broken orchestration devastates African businesses, not just economically but socially. This Nigerian customer used to purchase $1.5 million worth of fish daily from Germany. Every time foreign exchange rates shifted unpredictably due to delays and inefficiencies in the payment system, they absorbed the immediate impact quite easily. However, the true cost was borne by the poorest individuals, who could barely afford fish—a staple food—as prices surged. This example illustrates how painful and inefficient orchestration not only disrupts businesses but also makes life significantly harder for countless individuals across the continent.

Juicyway's real-time matching engine addresses these challenges head-on, ensuring supply and demand align seamlessly, protecting both businesses and the broader communities they serve.

Ownership of Naira Rates: A Path to Price Discovery

Juicyway’s ownership of the price discovery engine for naira rates, as showcased on our platform Naira Rates, marks a significant step forward in improving market efficiency. By providing transparent, real-time pricing data, we empower businesses and individuals to make smarter financial decisions.

Our ambition is to transform African markets with data, starting with the naira currency markets. This tool lays the groundwork for better price discovery and a future of market-to-market orchestration, eliminating guesswork and reducing volatility. Juicyway’s approach ensures that rates are rooted in real market dynamics, fostering stability and predictability for everyone. We want foreign exchange rates to reflect true market dynamics, rather than being skewed by fragmented systems or speculative pressures.

We hope to empower businesses to make informed financial decisions, reduce volatility, and create a more predictable economic environment. For individuals and businesses alike, it represents a future where African economies are not only reactive but proactive, with Juicyway leading the charge toward liquidity and transparency.

Comparative Analysis: Status Quo vs. Juicyway

Overlays both systems, emphasising Juicyway’s advantages in efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

Drawbacks to Our Model

Drawback: Custody as a Requirement for Orchestration

As an orchestrator, the primary drawback of our model is the need for custody to orchestrate liquidity flows. This requirement may concern some market participants, potentially discouraging them from joining our platform. However, this is a challenge we must address as we currently lack the clout to educate and assemble all market participants into a decentralised network.

Solution: Transition to AI-Driven Orchestration

In the future, as we grow and establish credibility, we envision creating an AI orchestrator that connects banking, fintech, and OTC databases to enable seamless liquidity matching without requiring custody. This orchestrator will leverage pre-trade and post-trade data to facilitate execution and clearing via an on-chain or hybrid clearing house. While this is a long-term goal, we acknowledge that we must first build our current model to gain the necessary influence and trust to implement such a solution.

Scaling Ambitions: Unlocking Intra-African Liquidity

A Two-Phased Approach:

1. Western to African Markets:
2. • Focus on scaling liquidity from Western markets (US, UK, Canada, EU) across Africa - starting with Nigeria.
   • Meet local currency demand for USD, EUR, GBP, YUAN, Stablecoins/crypto with real-time matching.
3. Intra-African Currency Pairs:
4. • Identify and unlock liquidity in trade corridors within Africa (e.g., NGN to ZAR, KES to GHS).
   • Observe and analyze trade flows to prioritize high-volume pairs.
   • Address liquidity gaps with data-driven interventions.

African Market Expansion Plan

For Juicyway to enter an African market, it must exhibit an apparent supply-demand problem justified by:

1. High Emigration: Countries with significant diaspora populations equate to high remittance inflows, showing supply.
2. Significant Export Proceeds: Markets with robust goods or services exports generate supply through foreign currency earnings.
3. Severe FX Shortages: Persistent foreign currency deficits highlight high demand for liquidity solutions.

The Remittance Model Legacy:

Traditional remittance systems enforce real-time supply-demand matching due to their poor infrastructure. Juicyway leverages this principle but extends it with modern technology to optimize liquidity distribution at scale.

A Sovereign Future for Africa

At Juicyway, we do not imagine a future where African countries are stripped of their sovereignty through the dollarization of their economies. Instead, we believe in empowering nations to maintain control over their monetary systems while fostering global economic participation. Our technology represents a leap forward in reinforcing this belief, ensuring that Africa’s growth remains inclusive and self-determined.

Why Juicyway Matters

Mission: To empower Africans by enabling seamless global transactions and increasing participation in the global economy.

Vision: A world where Africans can transact globally as easily as they do locally, free from the barriers of geography, currency, or infrastructure.

Investor Appreciation

We are incredibly grateful to our investors for trusting us at our pre-seed with $3 million. Your belief in our mission will be instrumental in shaping the future of cross-border payments. Special thanks to:

• Lead Investors: P1 Ventures and Ventures Platform
• Co-Investors: Future Africa, Magic Fund, TCVP, Stanford GSB Fund
• Angels: Gbenga Oyebode, Jeremy Johnson, Andrew Alli

Your support allows us to create transformative solutions for Africa’s payment challenges.

Product Suite: Adjacent Innovations for Liquidity

Our products may appear diverse, but they are strategically adjacent solutions designed to bring liquidity into our system. They work together to bridge the gaps in currency accessibility and payment infrastructure:

1. Local Currency Accounts: These accounts allow users to pay and receive payments locally, with the option to convert and make global payments seamlessly.
2. Foreign Currency Accounts: Enable businesses and individuals to receive, convert, and pay in foreign currencies efficiently.
3. Stablecoin and Crypto Wallets: Facilitate the conversion, payment, and receipt of stablecoins and cryptocurrencies, offering flexibility and speed.
4. Orderbook: set the price and terms you want to buy or sell currency form
5. Gateway for Collecting Crypto and Fiat: A unified solution to collect payments in both crypto and fiat currencies, streamlining financial operations.
6. Fiat and Crypto Disbursement APIs: Empower businesses with APIs to disburse payments in fiat or cryptocurrencies, ensuring scalability and ease of integration.

These products are integral to creating a network that fosters liquidity, accessibility, and interoperability in cross-border payments.

Stealth Success: $1.3 Billion in Transaction Volume

In stealth mode, Juicyway has already facilitated over $1.3 billion in transaction volume. This milestone underscores the robustness of our platform and the scalability of our approach to cross-border payments. It highlights the trust placed in us by early adopters and participants in our ecosystem, proving the viability of our liquidity-first model.

A Network for Everyone

Juicyway is more than a payment platform; it’s a new network designed to be inclusive and accessible to everyone. This aligns with our mission to increase the participation of Africans in the global economy by breaking down barriers and fostering financial empowerment. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, a student paying international tuition, or a family member sending remittances, our platform is built for you.

This inclusivity extends to unbanked and underbanked populations, ensuring that no one is left behind in the transformation of Africa’s financial landscape.

We want to create opportunities, foster connections, and build trust in a system designed for the future and we hope to have a lot of fun while at it.

With ❤️,

Ife Johnson