F-Squared Podcast

Valr is Africa's largest crypto exchange by volume, but the business has evolved well beyond exchange. Under founder Farzam Ehsani, Valr now provides modular on-chain financial infrastructure that banks and telcos plug into to offer their own customers crypto exposure, stablecoin savings, tokenised assets, and cross-border settlement. In a sector where reputational risk is the norm, the word that keeps coming up around Valr is "respect."
Farzam's path to building it has been circuitous. His family are Bahá'ís of Persian origin who were persecuted in Iran and settled in Nairobi in 1975. He grew up in Westlands, moved through Deloitte in San Francisco and McKinsey in Johannesburg, and joined Rand Merchant Bank during the Greek debt crisis, where he dismissed Bitcoin as a scam before falling into the rabbit hole that led him to set up the bank's blockchain unit and ultimately leave to build Valr in 2018.
In this conversation with Samora Kariuki, Farzam covers how Valr was built, why an exchange was the logical starting point, and how the business expanded into institutional infrastructure. He also reveals an unexpected source of conviction: a 1999 Bahá'í document that predicted the replacement of fragmented monetary systems by a single electronic currency, a decade before Bitcoin existed.

In this episode, you'll learn:
How Farzam's journey from Westlands to Deloitte, McKinsey, and Rand Merchant Bank led to founding Valr.

Why an exchange — a marketplace where people express divergent views by buying or selling — was the most logical starting point, and how Valr expanded from there.

How Valr's B2B2C model provides modular on-chain financial infrastructure (custody, liquidity, matching engines, risk engines) to institutions across Africa.

The concept of double-spending: the foundational problem Bitcoin solves that most crypto commentators never discuss.

Why the Bitcoin price is fundamentally a story about fiat devaluation, not market speculation.

How a 1999 Bahá'í prophecy about a universal electronic currency — written a decade before Bitcoin — underpins Farzam's worldview on where money is heading.

Why stablecoins pegged to the US dollar inherit the dollar's long-term fragility — and what the "free banking era" tells us about what comes next.

How fractional reserve banking works identically with Bitcoin, and why crypto doesn't eliminate the risk of bank runs.

Why regulatory maturity — not market size — is the key variable in Valr's expansion across Kenya, Nigeria, and beyond.

Key Quote: "I can host my files, music, and documents locally on my phone or computer, but I do not have that option for money. I have to rely on someone else's servers to show me my balance on their database."
Connect with Us:
Samora Kariuki (Host): https://www.linkedin.com/in/samorakariuki/

Farzam Ehsani (Guest): https://www.linkedin.com/in/farzam-ehsani/

Frontier Fintech: www.frontierfintech.substack.com

Useful Video on Farzam’s Thinking - https://youtu.be/5lup0b-FWBM?si=juJWtprP2iG8kfni

Banks have spent decades building the infrastructure that makes money move. Now, a new set of rails; blockchain, stablecoins, tokenized assets,  is being laid alongside those systems. The question isn't whether banks will have to engage with digital assets. It's whether they'll do it in time, and whether they'll do it right.
Rob Downes, Nkahiseng Ralepeli, and Robyn Lawson lead the digital assets team inside ABSA's Corporate and Investment Bank. Their journey started not with a bold strategic declaration, but with a quiet invitation, Project Khokha, the South African Reserve Bank's blockchain research initiative in 2021. Two weeks after FTX collapsed, they walked into Group Exco to make the case for why ABSA needed to move. This episode is the inside account of what happened next: three years of internal education, regulatory navigation, technical integration, and careful product sequencing that has produced what the team believes is one of the first regulated digital asset custody offerings on the continent and a gold-backed stablecoin built with regulator visibility by design.
Samora Kariuki sits down with the ABSA digital assets team to work through what it actually takes for a Tier-1 African bank to build in this space. The conversation covers the internal politics of getting risk and compliance on board, why custody was the right first product, the surprising bottleneck in tech integration, the demand signal they're seeing from institutional clients around tokenized assets and stablecoins, and how they've designed their gold-backed stablecoin to bring regulators along rather than force a confrontation.
In This Episode, You Will Hear:
Why ABSA started this team in the depths of the 2022 crypto winter and why they called it the "digital assets team," not the crypto team

The counterintuitive insight from Robyn: compliance and financial crime were enablers, not blockers, the harder conversation was with tech

Why custody was the correct first product: wallet infrastructure as the foundation for every downstream digital asset service

How ABSA is thinking about institutional demand from Bitcoin strategic reserves to tokenized real-world assets that generate yield

The rich data problem: when you can see a Bitcoin's entire transaction history going back a decade, what does that mean for risk and KYC policy?

How ABSA embedded zero-knowledge proofs into its gold-backed stablecoin to serve privacy-sensitive institutional clients

The cross-border stablecoin opportunity, and why the CASP regulatory framework in South Africa is creating clarity that other markets lack

What expansion across ABSA's African footprint looks like now that the infrastructure is built

Key Quote: "The growth in stablecoins, crypto, and financial market infrastructure using blockchain are threats to pan-African and global banks like ours, and we need to respond." — Rob Downes
Connect with Us:
Samora Kariuki (Host): https://www.linkedin.com/in/samorakariuki/

Rob Downes: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-downes-a970931/

Nkahiseng Ralepeli: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nkahiseng-ralepeli-46a962a6/

Robyn Lawson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robyn-lawson-online/

Frontier Fintech: www.frontierfintech.substack.com

For an operator moving millions across borders, Stone Atwine has come to understand where there’s real value to be created and where hype dominates. For him, having built his Fintech chops in a Mobile Money region, the value proposition for Stablecoins became evident almost immediately.  Why manage 10 different bank accounts and wait days for SWIFT when you can run a continental treasury from a single USDT buffer?
Stone Atwine is a battle-tested fintech veteran who was talking about unit economics long before the "Venture Winter" made it cool. From solving "black tax" remittances for his grandmother to building Eversend on a lean $1.2M seed round, Stone has transitioned the company from a B2C wallet to the high-leverage B2B infrastructure powering African trade.
This conversation moves away from the chatter about web3 towards how companies are solving real treasury challenges with stablecoins. Stone breaks down his "4-Level" payment architecture framework, a system that replaces traditional pre-funding with "Just-in-Time" liquidity. He explains why Eversend has completely abandoned SWIFT for internal operations and why the future of money looks like e-money on open rails.
In This Episode, You Will Hear:
The Death of SWIFT: Why Eversend no longer uses traditional bank messaging for internal treasury.

Centralized Stablecoin Treasury: Moving from fragmented local accounts to a single USDC buffer for 30-minute rebalancing.

The Settlement Tension: Why "Just-in-Time" instant settlement can sometimes be costlier than traditional netting.

Global Use Cases: Why players like Deel and Wise are the perfect fit for stablecoin infrastructure.

Evaluating the Stack: What banks need to learn about custodial services like Fireblocks and security audits.

The Issuance Arms Race: Why JPMorgan and Citi, not just Tether, could dominate the future of yield-bearing reserves.

CBDCs vs. Private Stablecoins: Why the BIS mBridge is a "brilliant idea" but local stablecoin mandates may be the more practical path.

"Stablecoins are basically e-money... but with a global ability to move on a blockchain ledger instead of a telco's ledger. It’s just-in-time financing for the real world."
Connect with Us:
Samora Kariuki (Host): https://www.linkedin.com/in/samorakariuki/

Stone Atwine (Guest): https://www.linkedin.com/in/stoneatwine/

Frontier Fintech: https://frontierfintech.substack.com/

Why does it take five days and $30 to move money from Mexico to the US, or Nigeria to China? In a world of instant communication, the "black hole" of correspondent banking is still swallowing billions in fees and lost time.
Kirill Gertmann, CEO of Conduit, is a 20-year fintech veteran who spent years in traditional banking before diving into crypto. After surviving the 2022 DeFi collapse without losing a cent of client funds, he pivoted Conduit from a "yield" platform to a "utility" powerhouse. Today, Conduit is the "Money Movement Operating System" helping businesses and banks bypass the 1970s-era SWIFT architecture.
This episode deconstructs the strategic shift from speculative DeFi to practical cross-border execution. Kirill explains the "stablecoin sandwich" model, the reality of "hard mode" jurisdictions, how Africa is likely to be their biggest geography by end of 2026, and why the ultimate "SWIFT killer" isn't a new coin, but a superior distribution network. We explore why Tier 2 banks are the next big frontier for stablecoin adoption and why CBDCs are likely a dead end.

In This Episode, You Will Hear:
The Pivot: How the 2022 crypto crash forced a move from DeFi yield to solving the "on-ramp" problem in Latin America.

The "Stablecoin Sandwich": Why the most successful fintechs abstract crypto away so CFOs only see fiat-to-fiat results.

Bypassing SWIFT: Why Tier 2 banks are desperate for an alternative to the "bottleneck" of correspondent banking.

The Africa Growth Story: Why Nigeria has a "higher pain point" than Mexico, how partnering with local fintechs scales growth and how Africa will be their largest geography by end of 2026.

The Network Moat: Why Tether (USDT) dominates the Global South and why "distribution beats yield" every time.

The Compliance Hurdle: How to balance aggressive growth with the "boring stuff" like SOC2 and rigorous KYB.

Key Quote: "Most crypto use cases were speculative. We wanted to build something people would actually use every day... The only moat in payments is the network. Visa and Mastercard are successful because of their network and distribution, not secret technology."
Connect with Us:
Samora Kariuki (Host): https://www.linkedin.com/in/samorakariuki/

Kirill Gertmann (Guest): https://www.linkedin.com/in/kirillgertman/

Frontier Fintech: https://frontierfintech.substack.com/

Why does Nigeria have 120 million people with digital identities but only 70 million with bank accounts? Despite a decade of growth, the "last mile" of financial inclusion remains a stubborn red ocean.

Samora Kariuki sits down with Olu Akanmu, a rare leader who has navigated the "commercial battlefield" at the highest levels of telcos, Tier-1 banks, and scale-up fintechs (OPay). From his work with EFInA to his current role in academia at Lagos Business School, Olu brings a balanced perspective on why Nigeria’s fintech journey looks so different from the rest of the continent.

This episode is a masterclass in the structural realities of the Nigerian market. Olu deconstructs the "Banking Lobby" that slowed mobile money, the friction between competing national identity systems (BVN vs. NIN), and why the next phase of fintech must move from simple payments to deep credit integration. He also provides a candid critique of "generic" late-stage fintech strategies and the internal politics that kill bank-led innovation.

In This Episode, You Will Hear:
The Banking Lobby vs. Telcos: A behind-the-scenes look at why mobile money struggled to launch in Nigeria and how fintechs filled the gap.
The Prosperity Paradox: Why financial inclusion cannot scale in Northern Nigeria without solving for economic inclusion first.
Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI): The missed opportunity of siloed identity and payment systems (BVN vs. NIN).
Open Banking & the Credit Gap: Why payments grew 30% but credit only 4%, and how Open Banking can bridge that divide.
Late-Stage Consolidation: Why "regulatory arbitrage" is ending and how fintechs must find "uncontested markets" to survive.
The "Frigate Elephant" Problem: Why bank-led fintech subsidiaries often fail due to traditional banking mindsets.
The "Peak Mobile Money" Myth: Why declining agent revenues are actually a sign of a maturing digital ecosystem.

"Strategy begins with looking at your unique capabilities... You cannot come in as a late entrant offering a generic proposition and expect to scale in a contested market."

Connect with Us:
Samora Kariuki (Host): https://www.linkedin.com/in/samorakariuki/
Olu Akanmu (Guest): https://www.linkedin.com/in/olu-akanmu-88280a/
Frontier Fintech: frontierfintech.substack.com