Nigerian cryptocurrency exchange Busha is expanding its services beyond digital asset trading to position itself as a broader financial infrastructure provider for consumers and businesses across Africa.
- Nigerian cryptocurrency exchange Busha is expanding its services beyond digital asset trading to position itself as a broader financial infrastructure...
- The company has introduced products that allow users to pay utility bills, access crypto-backed loans, earn returns on savings, and...
- What the licence did for us was more for our customers; it created more trust and security,” Openiyi said.
- Busha says the product is designed to provide liquidity without requiring users to sell their holdings, with loan amounts tied...
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The company has introduced products that allow users to pay utility bills, access crypto-backed loans, earn returns on savings, and make cross-border transactions using digital assets.
Speaking on the company’s strategy, Busha Product Manager Oluwadara Openiyi said regulatory compliance has been integrated into product development from the outset and has helped the company strengthen customer confidence following their regulatory approvals.
According to her, regulatory licensing has played a key role in strengthening trust among customers and institutional partners.
“Even from conception, we ensure that compliance is involved and our regulators are involved before we even build. What the licence did for us was more for our customers; it created more trust and security,” Openiyi said.
Busha targets daily consumer spending
Busha’s latest consumer offerings include a bill-payment feature that lets users pay for airtime, mobile data, electricity, and television subscriptions directly from their crypto balances. The company says the service allows digital assets to be used for everyday transactions without requiring merchants to understand or interact with blockchain technology.
The product, recently rebranded as Pay Bill, is part of Busha’s effort to move beyond serving as a crypto on-ramp and off-ramp and into everyday financial transactions.
According to Openiyi, stablecoins such as USDT account for most of the spending activity on the platform, as users increasingly seek alternatives to preserve value amid naira volatility.
The exchange has also expanded its lending products, allowing customers to obtain naira loans using digital assets such as Bitcoin and USDT as collateral. Busha says the product is designed to provide liquidity without requiring users to sell their holdings, with loan amounts tied to the market value of pledged assets and interest rates set at 2 per cent.
Openiyi said customers often use the lending facility for investment opportunities rather than emergency cash needs.
“Most of the time, they take out loans to buy a particular asset because they can see that the asset is going up, and they want to add to it,” she said.
The exchange’s savings products currently offer returns of up to 20 per cent annually on naira deposits and 7.5 per cent on dollar-denominated savings, providing users with alternatives to traditional savings channels.
B2B infrastructure and institutional clients
Beyond retail services, Busha is targeting businesses via application programming interfaces (APIs) that enable stablecoin settlements, foreign exchange conversions, cross-border payments, and customer verification.
Openiyi said the company’s business clients span multiple sectors of the economy. “We have clients in the aviation industry and oil and gas; we have importers and exporters and fintechs that use our APIs,” she said, adding that adoption of the services has continued to grow.
However, the company did not disclose customer numbers or transaction volumes. Busha is also developing virtual and physical dollar-denominated debit cards designed to support international spending using stablecoin balances, subject to regulatory requirements.
The company believes wider adoption of digital assets across Africa will depend not only on product development but also on financial education. According to Openiyi, expanding awareness among traders, small businesses, and everyday consumers will be critical to driving mainstream usage over the coming years.
The expansion comes as cryptocurrency firms across Africa increasingly seek practical use cases beyond trading, with payments, remittances, and cross-border commerce emerging as key areas of competition in the region’s digital finance ecosystem.