Africans pay the world's highest cost to send money home. Binance wants to change that

Sending money across a border within Sub-Saharan Africa costs more than anywhere else in the world.

According to the World Bank, moving $200 between African countries costs an average of 8.78 percent of the amount sent, nearly 9 cents of every dollar, compared with a global average of 6.49 percent. For a continent that sends and receives tens of billions of dollars in remittances each year, that gap adds up to real money lost by ordinary families and small businesses.

Binance, the world's leading blockchain ecosystem and cryptocurrency exchange, says part of the answer is already familiar to millions of Africans, even those who have never traded crypto. Long before digital assets, informal savings and trading groups across the continent moved money directly between members without ever routing it through a bank.

In South Africa, these are called stokvels. In Kenya, chamas. In Ghana, susu. The mechanics differ slightly by country, but the principle is the same: people pooling, lending and exchanging money based on trust from person to person.

That same principle underpins Binance's direct trading service, known as P2P. In many African markets banks do not yet offer a direct way to convert cash into crypto or back again. Binance's answer is to connect a buyer and a seller directly.

For example, one person wants to convert cash via a bank transfer or mobile money into crypto, while another wants to do the reverse. Binance provides the security, verifying both users and holding the seller's crypto in escrow until the buyer's payment is confirmed, releasing it thereafter to ensure that neither side walks away with both the money and the crypto.

In markets where direct bank deposits into exchanges are limited, this direct trading has become the standard way users convert local currency into crypto and back again as it does not depend on the same banking rails that make cross-border payments slow and expensive elsewhere.

"For a lot of people, the idea of sending money via another person rather than through a bank is not new. It is how some parents and grandparents have saved and moved money for generations," said Larry Cooke, Binance Africa.

“What this creates is a digital rail that works across borders, and one that is verified and traceable at every step. A trader in Nairobi can pay a supplier in Accra using crypto converted from their own local currency, and the supplier can convert it back into their own currency on their end. Every transaction is recorded on the blockchain, and every user completes identity verification before they can trade. It is not about avoiding oversight, it is about making cross-border payments visible, secure and accountable in a way traditional channels often aren't."

The shift is already showing up in the data. Crypto activity across Sub-Saharan Africa grew by more than 50 percent in the year to June 2025 according to Chainalysis. Some of the sharpest increases followed periods of currency instability when households were looking for a way to protect the value of what they had saved.

Alongside this, is Binance Earn. While direct trading helps people move money, Earn is designed to help them hold onto its value. Users can deposit crypto they already own and earn a return on it over time in the same way a savings account pays interest, only without being tied to a currency that can lose a significant share of its value overnight. 

"None of this works in isolation," Cooke added. "It has to be built alongside regulators, central banks and trade bodies and it must come with real financial education. This is why we continue to invest in free resources through Binance Academy. Our approach in Africa is to build tools that extend what people already do well, rather than ask them to change how they operate."

Binance said it will continue expanding access to direct trading and Earn across African markets throughout 2026, working alongside regulators and policymakers on the continent.