Clea, a fintech that emerged from stealth this year, is building a route through that problem using stablecoins as a settlement layer. Its founder and CEO, Sheriff Adedokun, spoke to The Fintech Times about how the rails work, what it takes to open a corridor and why compliance ended up inside the product rather than alongside it.

Adedokun describes a familiar pattern. “A Nigerian importer may have naira available today, yet struggle to access USD, EUR, GBP or CNY at the exact size and time required,” he said. “Traditional bank processes can involve FX allocation delays, manual documentation, multiple intermediaries and settlement times of several days.”

The consequences land on the supplier relationship. “When the supplier is an auction house, shipper or manufacturer working to a deadline, that delay can mean storage fees, lost discounts, cancelled orders or missed shipping windows.”

Informal FX channels have filled the gap, but Adedokun argues they trade one problem for another: “weak transparency, payments arriving from unrelated third parties, difficult reconciliation and higher fraud or compliance risk.” Clea’s answer is to combine local funding, FX conversion and supplier settlement in one workflow, so that the importer “funds locally, converts at a visible rate and pays a verified overseas supplier through formal banking rails, with the transaction linked back to the importer and a complete audit trail.”

Neither end of a Clea payment touches crypto. “The simplest way to think about Clea is that the customer experience is fiat, while stablecoins operate in the settlement layer behind the scenes,” Adedokun said.

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