Esca Finance, a foreign exchange infrastructure startup founded by Nigerian entrepreneur Shalom Osiadi, is seeking to solve one of Africa’s currency instability.

Esca is building infrastructure that allows businesses to convert and hedge local currency exposure into hard currencies such as the US dollar, euro and British pound in real time.

The idea for Esca Finance emerged from a personal financial shock experienced by Osiadi’s family during Nigeria’s currency crisis in 2022.

As the naira weakened sharply against the dollar, properties his parents had acquired in Nigeria before emigrating to Ireland lost significant value in dollar terms, despite no change in the underlying assets. That experience, he said, crystallised a broader structural problem facing African businesses.

“I built a Euro‑backed stablecoin in 2018, which taught me financial engineering. I used that experience to build an ecosystem that lets businesses hedge currency exposure in volatile markets like Nigeria, using stablecoins and Bitcoin inside the infrastructure. That’s essentially what became Esca today,” said Osiadi.

From Food Delivery Experiment to FX Infrastructure

Osiadi’s entrepreneurial journey began while studying computer science and business at Dublin City University, where he taught himself programming as a teenager.

His first venture, Esca Menu, was a food delivery platform connecting home chefs and small restaurants to customers in Ireland and later Nigeria. However, the business quickly revealed an unexpected pattern.

Although restaurants signed up in large numbers and repeated transactions were recorded, delivery volumes were unusually low. Instead, merchants were using the platform primarily to store earnings in stablecoins rather than naira.

In an environment of currency volatility, businesses viewed digital dollar-pegged assets as a hedge against inflation and devaluation.

By December 2022, Osiadi shut down the food delivery layer entirely and pivoted the company into a financial infrastructure business.

Pivot to Currency Hedging and Treasury Infrastructure

In early 2023, Esca integrated with Nigerian fintech PalmPay, enabling merchants using point-of-sale terminals to receive cashback in stablecoins. However, the company soon moved beyond payments infrastructure to focus entirely on FX and liquidity services.

By August 2023, Esca had abandoned hardware partnerships and repositioned itself as Esca Finance, a full-scale currency management platform.

The company now enables businesses to convert local earnings into foreign currencies instantly, helping them protect revenues from depreciation.

Esca’s clients include firms operating across Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon, Mozambique, Angola, South Africa, as well as partners in Europe and Latin America.

The Dublin-headquartered company, which operates across Nigeria, Ghana and Canada, processes between $75 million and $120 million in monthly transactions and generated around $1.4 million in revenue in 2025, according to its founder. It is targeting $6 million in revenue by 2026.

How Esca Finance Works

Esca provides businesses with multi-currency accounts that allow them to receive, convert and hold funds in both local and hard currencies.

After onboarding and compliance checks, clients receive local accounts alongside USD, GBP and EUR accounts in Europe. Companies can then automatically convert incoming local currency revenues into foreign currency at prevailing exchange rates.

This structure allows firms to shield revenues from currency fluctuations, ensuring financial reporting stability in hard currency terms.

For foreign companies operating in Africa, Esca enables reverse flows, accepting local currency payments and converting them into stable foreign balances without requiring businesses to directly manage exposure to volatile markets.

Serving Corporates and Global Financial Platforms

Osiadi said around 20 per cent of Esca’s clients are financial institutions and infrastructure providers, including remittance firms and crypto platforms such as NALA, MoneyGram and Stripe-owned Bridge.

The remaining client base consists of exporters and corporates in sectors such as energy, metals and logistics, industries heavily exposed to FX volatility.

Esca also offers forward contracts that allow businesses to lock in exchange rates for future transactions, alongside interest-bearing local currency deposit products offering returns of up to 20 per cent, according to the company.

Esca generates revenue through FX spreads and transaction fees ranging between 0.3 per cent and 2 per cent, depending on transaction size. It also charges a $300 onboarding fee to filter non-serious clients.

While stablecoins play a key role in Esca’s backend infrastructure, customers interact primarily in fiat currencies, with transactions typically settled within 24 hours.

The company relies on a network of around 70 liquidity providers to execute trades across multiple corridors, particularly in markets with restricted capital flows such as Ethiopia, Mozambique and Angola.

Regulatory Footprint and Expansion Plans

Esca is structured as a European fintech with operational hubs in Africa. It is headquartered in Dublin and holds entities in Nigeria, Ghana and Canada.

The company is registered as a Money Services Business (MSB) in Canada and is pursuing an Electronic Money Institution (EMI) licence in Ireland.

In Nigeria, it operates through licensed third-party partners, while engaging regulators including the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on potential virtual asset service provider approval.

Esca is also pursuing regulatory approvals in Ghana and other African markets.

Looking ahead, Esca plans to expand deeper into African markets and extend its infrastructure into Latin America, including Brazil and Mexico.

Osiadi’s long-term ambition is to position the company as core financial infrastructure for businesses operating across volatile currency regions.

Talking Points

It is striking that Esca Finance is emerging from a deeply personal frustration around currency devaluation, yet scaling into a full-fledged FX infrastructure provider for emerging markets.

This origin story reflects a wider reality across Africa, where currency volatility is not just a macroeconomic issue but a daily operational risk for businesses trying to plan, report, and preserve value.

At Techparley, we see Esca as part of a new wave of fintech infrastructure startups shifting focus from payments alone to currency preservation and treasury management.

The company’s integration of stablecoins and traditional FX rails also highlights how digital assets are increasingly being used not as speculative tools, but as functional liquidity infrastructure in volatile markets.

As Esca expands into more markets across Africa and Latin America, the challenge will be balancing rapid growth with the operational discipline required in high-risk FX environments.

If successful, Esca could redefine how emerging market businesses think about currency exposure, not as a risk to manage manually, but as an automated layer of financial infrastructure.

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