We’ve grown accustomed to cross-border money transfers being fast; with a few taps, you can move £100 from London to Lagos and reasonably expect it to reach its recipient within the hour.
Yet, every cross-border transfer is a small act of trust between strangers in different jurisdictions, and the system rests on the simple idea that before anyone moves a pound, someone has to know — with evidence — exactly who is moving it. This type of information costs time and money.
If you’re in London, drowning in work, with family back home depending on the money you send, sending it should be the easy part of your week, but it sometimes isn’t. Before any remittance company will take your cash, you have to convince them you are who you say you are; they’ll need your name, address, date of birth, and documents. After all that, there might be a short wait for your identity to be verified.
Adebayo Familusi knows this dance from the other side of the counter because he ran Remitise, a small FCA-registered payment firm in London that had to verify every customer before it could move their money.
In January 2023, Familusi’s life got easier when TrueLayer launched Signup+, which verifies a customer’s name, address and date of birth directly from their bank. Remitise was among the first businesses to sign up, with Familusi quoted in the launch announcement as calling the old way “manual, time-consuming tasks.”
It was the kind of unglamorous, clever arrangement that keeps a small payments firm alive.
£253
By the end of May 2025, Remitise had £253 in cash. Two hundred and fifty-three pounds. Its payroll — nearly £41,000 the year before — had fallen to zero. Whatever business Remitise still had, it wasn’t much. What it did have was a very interesting filing cabinet.
In July 2026, a new name appeared in its share register: Raelic Payment Ltd, a company set up seven months earlier by Raenest, the Nigerian fintech that has spent four years building a way for Africans to get paid by the world.
Raelic took 70 of Remitise’s 100 shares. In August, Raenest co-founders Victor Alade and Sodruldeen Mustapha joined the board. By September, Raelic held all 100 shares. Today, Raenest announced the acquisition for an undisclosed price.
The asset nobody can speed-run
To understand what Raenest just bought, follow a freelancer in Lagos. She’s done the work for a London client who owes her £1,000. Instead of wire transfers and correspondent banks, she opens her Raenest app, copies an account number and sort code onto her invoice, and the client makes a local UK bank transfer. Done. Raenest names Clear Junction as the provider of those UK accounts.
But that’s money coming in. What if someone in London wants to send that same £1,000 to their mother in Lagos? That’s a different business entirely — money remittance — and in the UK you can’t do it without the Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA) permission. A remitter can take the money and arrange for the recipient to be paid without opening any kind of account for either party. That is the activity listed on Remitise’s FCA register entry.
Remitise is registered as a small payment institution, which caps its monthly volume at €3 million, averaged over a year. It’s modest, but a cap you can outgrow is a far better problem than a door that doesn’t open at all.
Raenest already holds an IMTO licence from the Central Bank of Nigeria, which means it can legally handle remittances arriving in Nigeria. Slot Remitise in at the UK end and you have the makings of a UK-to-Nigeria corridor where Raenest holds the permission at both ends. No rented licences, and a lot less hoping and praying that a partner doesn’t abruptly cut you off. The company that takes the money in London and the company that pays it out in Lagos would ultimately be the same people.
Raenest was founded in 2022 by Alade, Mustapha and COO Richard Oyome, and now claims 1.5 million registered customers and more than $3 billion processed. In February 2025, it raised an $11 million Series A led by QED Investors, bringing its disclosed funding above $14 million, money earmarked, in part, for this kind of infrastructure investment. Beyond Nigeria’s IMTO, Raenest is registered as an MSB and a PSP in Canada. Every piece of that map points to a strategy of owning the infrastructure.
“Building a global financial company requires more than making products available in different countries,” Alade said in today’s announcement. “It requires the right infrastructure, partnerships and regulatory foundations in every market we serve.” Translated from press release speak: we’d rather own the door than keep knocking on someone else’s.
The bill still comes due
Before anyone pictures a frictionless, fully in-house corridor, a few cold showers.
Remitise still needs a partner to settle over Faster Payments — an SPI registration doesn’t come with rails attached. On the Nigerian side, the CBN requires remittance operators to settle and pay recipients through accounts at authorised banks, so the last mile still runs through someone else’s plumbing.
And then there’s the cost Familusi was trying to cut back in 2023, which never goes away: someone has to check who’s sending the money, and someone has to chase the transfers that get flagged. A licence transfers the permission but it doesn’t transfer the work. Compliance, as every fintech learns eventually, is a treadmill you inherit.
There’s also the €3 million cap. Raenest’s $3 billion is everything it has ever processed, everywhere; Remitise’s limit is a monthly average for one small firm in one country. Going past it means applying to the FCA for full authorisation, a slower and costlier thing than registration, though it’s a lot easier to grow a registration you already own than to queue for a new one. Until then, the question for Raenest is which transfers are worth bringing in-house at €3 million a month.
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*Paid partnership with Raenest.