Welcome to the ADX. Today I have Mouloukou Sanoh in the studio. He is the CEO and co-founder of Mansa, a stablecoin-powered settlement infrastructure company. Welcome, Mouloukou. Thank you for joining us today.
Thank you so much for having me. It's an absolute honour to be here. I've been watching this show, so I'm very happy to be here today.
Let's kick off with what Mansa does. Today's global payment system is becoming increasingly complex — can you give us a one-on-one on what Mansa is doing in the payments sector?
Essentially, Mansa is a global instant settlement platform. We work with leading fintechs across key emerging markets — Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia — where traditional banking infrastructure has been largely non-existent, where payments can take T+7 to settle, and where according to the World Bank it costs 10% on average to send money to Africa, 7% to Latin America, and 5% to Southeast Asia. What Mansa does is enable these fintechs to settle their payments T+0 — instantly — without having to go through correspondent banking. In the past 22 months, we have settled over $540 million in payments, and we have also paid out over $10 million into markets like China.
Can we talk about how you're actually doing this? Pre-funding is a term we hear a lot — can you explain what it is and why it's such a hidden drag on cross-border finance?
The way I describe pre-funding is that it's a tax on growth. In the current correspondent banking system, there is no such thing as instant payments. SWIFT is a messaging system — it is not a value transfer system. If payment companies, financial institutions, or banks want to transfer money instantly, they must park their funds across every market they wish to serve. If I give you one dollar here and you want that dollar on the other side, I need to already have a dollar sitting there, or I have to go through correspondent banking and wait. Mansa's mission is to kill pre-funding. We have raised a balance sheet of over $100 million, and we use that to pre-fund ourselves on behalf of our payment company clients — so they can settle instantly while we handle the collection and disbursement on both ends.
Is that the reason you've scaled so fast? Was this a problem so large and so avoided by others that first-mover advantage was almost inevitable?
Yes, and I think it comes down to two things. First, most payment and stablecoin solutions being built today are focused on the US and Europe — markets where payments are already pretty instant, where you have SEPA, PayPal, and solid banking infrastructure. Stablecoins don't really move the needle there. In emerging markets, however, is where the largest friction exists, the lowest dollar availability, and the worst financial infrastructure — and where the most impact can be made. We focused on solving the hard problem first. Now that we've solved pre-funding, we are building everything else on top — payouts, collections, on and off-ramp. We scaled quickly because we went to the markets with the highest demand.
The end user never actually sees the stablecoins — they just want to send currency A and receive currency B. Would you say Mansa is part of this new era of invisible crypto infrastructure?
Definitely. There is a lot of hype — good and bad — around stablecoins. But people must remember that stablecoins are not a magic bullet. The person sending and the person receiving don't want stablecoins. They want to send one currency and receive another. Stablecoins are simply the backend infrastructure that enables money to move faster cross-border at instant speeds. But you still need interoperability between stablecoins and fiat currencies to make it truly powerful. A stablecoin is only as good as its ability to move in and out of local currency. That is why we primarily transact in USDT — it has the most liquidity, the most depth, and the most acceptance across all the markets we serve.
Tether is not just an equity investor in Mansa — they are an active partner in the day-to-day movement of money. How does that relationship work?
Tether has been the best partner for Mansa. They have been incredibly supportive, and I don't think anyone understands the pain points of global payments and how to solve them more than Tether. They have been a guide, a mentor, and have introduced us to some of the biggest payment companies in the world. We work incredibly closely together to ensure that payments in emerging markets are as seamless as possible.
Let's talk about near real-time settlement into mainland China. How is China coming into the global payments story and how are you solving one of the world's most important payment corridors?
I actually grew up in China — I spent 22 of my 30 years there. That gave me a key insight: China is the most important payment corridor in the world. Every key emerging market's biggest trading partner is China. And one of the core reasons stablecoins have grown so significantly is that people in emerging markets needed to trade with Chinese merchants who wanted dollars, but dollar availability was very low. When we were building out our pre-funding and settlement infrastructure, we realised that China had the highest friction of any market we operated in — payments were taking 7+ days and fees were enormous. So we built same-day settlement with SWIFT interoperability as well as integration with China's local instant payment rails. Payment companies can pay us in stablecoins or in dollars, and we will settle the same day.
Mouloukou, that has been absolutely fascinating. Thank you so much for sharing these insights with us today.
Thank you so much for having me. I feel incredibly honoured and I look forward to coming back very soon.
