Plugging Africa Into the Global Economy

In this edition of Founder’s Hustle, Bilal Dahlab, co-founder of Moneco, takes us inside one of Africa’s most complicated challenges: building the financial rails the continent was never given. For millions across Africa and the diaspora, participating in the global economy isn’t a question of ambition, it’s a question of access. Bilal’s story traces how a simple pain point turned into a decade-long mission to rebuild cross-border finance for the people the system wasn’t built to serve.

How It All Started

Born and raised in Switzerland to an Algerian father, Bilal followed a conventional path early in his career: University of St. Gallen, private banking at Lombard Odier, some time exploring blockchain, then strategy consulting at Boston Consulting Group.

It was at BCG, out of the Casablanca office, working with banks and financial institutions across francophone Africa, that he started seeing the massive gap in financial services across the continent. Cross-border payments were a maze, currencies weren’t convertible and banks struggled with compliance, risk, and basic product innovation. Entrepreneurs couldn’t scale beyond their borders. Ordinary people couldn’t participate in the global economy. That’s where the idea for Moneco was born, with a vision to rebuild the financial backbone Africa had been denied.

When the System Isn’t Built for You

Moneco didn’t directly start in Africa. It started in Europe, with a painfully simple question: why is it so hard for Africans moving to Europe to open a bank account? “The big European banks want to hedge their risk,” Bilal explains. “They don’t want to open accounts for people whose situations don’t look fully stable yet.”

Legacy institutions still run on heavy, branch-based models with expensive compliance engines built to serve predictable customers. Newcomers from Africa rarely fit that mold. They arrive with cash, informal income, irregular transfers, and financial behaviors European banks don't know how to interpret. To manage that uncertainty, these banks put up more barriers: residence permits, proof of income, local addresses, all things many newcomers don’t have yet.

This is where Moneco broke the pattern. For a while, it was the only neobank in France that allowed Africans to open an account with just a passport. No residency card. No French paperwork. Just identity.

But Bilal insists this wasn’t about being “more flexible” than other banks, it was about building a totally different model. “You can think of us as a wealth manager at a retail scale," he says. Wealth-management banks routinely onboard clients from anywhere in the world with a passport and proper background checks. What matters is whether the institution can understand, monitor, and serve cross-border financial behavior. Moneco simply applied that logic to ordinary people, Africans moving to Europe.

It worked, but then something unexpected happened. Every time someone in France opened an account, family and friends back home attempted to do the same on Moneco. “We realized people in Africa desperately wanted access to international accounts, for payments, cross-border commerce, remittances and savings protected against inflation,” Bilal explains. 

A Cross-Border Problem Excluding a Continent

People in Africa weren’t asking for international accounts out of convenience, they needed them because their local systems simply didn’t work for a global world. Across much of Africa, currencies aren’t truly convertible. You can receive money from abroad, but your card won’t work outside your borders. Sending money out is slow, expensive, and buried in paperwork. 

For decades, remittances were controlled by a few giants like Western Union, Ria and MoneyGram, who secured exclusive deals with banks and controlled whole corridors. Prices stayed high because there was no alternative. New digital challengers like Sendwave and Taptap Send brought down fees, but the deeper structural problem remained: African users were still treated as edge cases. Even global neobanks like Revolut, Wise, and N26 never built systems for African financial behaviors.

Moneco’s insight was simple: if you rebuild the infrastructure, compliance, and economics around African realities, you don’t just include an underserved market, you create a new financial rail entirely.

What Moneco Actually Does

Today, Moneco gives people in francophone Africa something their local banking systems rarely offer: a real international account. Users sign up with a passport or national ID, submit a local proof of address, and once verified, they can create euro and dollar accounts in their own name, usable anywhere in the world.

Freelancers and remote workers route their earnings into Moneco because transfers arrive faster, with fewer fees, and in a currency they can actually use. Their Moneco card lets them pay for global tools and online services that reject local African cards. Airbnb hosts and landlords now collect rent in euros or dollars instead of unstable local currencies. Exporters get paid in hard currency for goods they ship abroad, shielding their earnings from inflation.

In countries with dual exchange rates, the impact is dramatic. Users who get paid in euros or dollars and convert through trusted networks can increase the real value of their income by up to 40%. All these use cases point to the same fundamental truth: without a global account and a card that works everywhere, Africa remains locked out of the digital and global economy. 

Onboarding the African economy

Whether it's Africans in Europe trying to open a bank account or someone back home trying to access the global economy, the mechanics of how Moneco works are the same. Legally, Moneco operates under the same kind of license as any other regulated European fintech. That’s not what differentiates them. The real difference is in how the system is built.

Everything starts with onboarding. The team understands African documents, languages, and formats, from Arabic proofs of address to handwritten attestations. They run layered checks in the background, analyzing email integrity, phone number histories, digital footprints, and even darker corners of the internet. The aim is not to block users, but to filter out bad actors without excluding legitimate customers, something traditional banks have consistently failed to do.

Once someone is onboarded, the real work begins. Early access is intentionally limited; as a user builds a clean history, more of the product opens up. Moneco monitors how money moves: how fast it arrives and leaves, where it goes next, and how patterns evolve. Speed is the strongest red flag. Fraudsters tend to receive funds and push them out instantly, or break large amounts into small transfers. Moneco watches for those signals, slows things down when needed, asks for documentation, or blocks specific routes entirely.  “So far, we’re happy with our fraud rate,” Bilal says. “We’re almost at the same level as European banks.”

The infrastructure Moneco runs on

Behind the scenes, all of this sits on a web of partners: sponsor banks, card issuers, remittance providers, mobile money aggregators, KYC vendors, transaction-monitoring systems. Moneco essentially orchestrates the entire stack. While partnerships enable Moneco to accelerate execution and avoid heavy infrastructure build-out, they also create dependencies and operational complexities.

Under this structure, the sponsor bank carries the legal risk, and because of that, every change, every feature update, every product expansion, must be validated externally. When one institution shifts its risk appetite, tightens compliance rules, or changes its policies, the entire product can be affected overnight.

The volatility of this model became brutally clear when several African countries were suddenly placed on the FATF grey list. Moneco’s European partner bank, the institution issuing IBANs, stopped serving users from those markets immediately. Transaction volumes collapsed to a third of their usual level. “For a big bank, the reaction is simple,” Bilal says. “They stop serving those markets and move on. For us, that wasn’t an option.”

The team spent the entire summer replacing the partner bank. A new bank stepped in, motivated by the prospect of onboarding thousands of active users and real transaction flow overnight. By September, activity had recovered. 

What Moneco’s License Actually Unlocks

After proving the model with the diaspora and demonstrating strong compliance, Moneco finally secured its own license, a turning point that fundamentally changed how the company could operate. Under the old structure in France, Moneco was functioning as an agent of an electronic-money institution. That setup came with heavy constraints. They could only serve the African diaspora in France, and any new feature or geographic expansion required approval from their French sponsor. 

Their new MSB license in Canada flipped that balance. With it, Moneco reports directly to the central bank. The team can decide for themselves which products to launch and which regions to serve. They can operate across borders without waiting for a sponsor bank to sign off on every change. 

But even with their own license, autonomy is not absolute. Moneco still relies on partner banks for parts of its infrastructure: IBAN issuance, card programs, settlement accounts, and other financial plumbing. These partners no longer carry the legal risk for Moneco’s transactions, but they can still refuse certain markets or tighten their policies.

This is why Bilal describes their current operating model as an “intermediate stage”, significantly more independent than before, but still exposed to external shocks that no license alone can prevent.

The North Star: End-to-End Control

The long-term ambition is clear: build the infrastructure that allows Moneco to control the entire transaction journey from start to finish. True stability in cross-border finance only becomes possible when a company owns its rails, and eventually connects directly to central banks without intermediaries.

That is what Bilal calls the “five-star version” of Moneco: a system where no partner decision can shut down a feature, block a country, or slow product innovation. But getting there requires scale, credibility, and capital. For a company with ten thousand users, this level of infrastructure would be financially impossible. For a company with hundreds of thousands, it becomes mandatory. Very few fintechs ever reach this degree of sovereignty. But Moneco is climbing toward it, layer by layer. 

Unique Revenue Stream

Moneco makes money the way most fintechs do, through account-opening fees, subscription plans, and transaction charges. But unlike traditional neobanks, there is an additional, far more powerful engine underneath the surface: foreign exchange.

Most neobanks make almost nothing on domestic spending. A Revolut or Wise user paying in euros inside Europe generates close to zero margin. Moneco, however, is built on a completely different pattern, because its users live in a completely different reality.

 “Our customers hold euros or dollars, but they spend in dinars, dirhams, francs,” Bilal explains. “So almost every transaction involves FX. That’s why our unit economics look nothing like a traditional neobank’s.” For Moneco, cross-border isn’t a feature, it is the default behavior. Every local payment triggers an automatic conversion, and every conversion generates revenue via spreads. 

Why Stablecoins Matter

Cross-border activity isn’t just how Moneco makes money, it’s also where traditional banking infrastructure breaks down. And that’s exactly why stablecoins sit quietly at the core of Moneco’s system.

In traditional finance, offering fast international transfers requires remittance companies to pre-fund money across multiple countries. Those idle balances drain cash flow and make real-time settlement expensive or impossible. For a company built on African cross-border flows, frequent, fragmented, and high-volume, that model simply doesn’t work. 

Stablecoins fix the bottleneck. “They let us execute transactions across borders almost in real time without having money sleeping everywhere,” Bilal says. “We can offer the same speed as a traditional remittance company, but at a fraction of the cost.”

Instead of immobilizing capital in multiple jurisdictions, Moneco can move stablecoins globally and settle them through the most efficient rail available. For large or recurring transactions, the difference in speed and cost is substantial. Moneco uses a hybrid model: banking rails on one side, stablecoin rails on the other, choosing whichever delivers faster, cheaper, compliant settlement for that transaction.

What Success Looks Like

To arrive where Moneco is today, the path was anything but straightforward. “The first difficulty we had was simply going live,” he says. “We had to start over three times.”

Each restart came at the worst possible moment. Integrations were nearly complete, early transactions were running, the launch felt within reach, and then a partner changed its policy, a requirement shifted, a door closed. Everything reset to zero. In a market where regulations evolve overnight, and a single partner decision can shut down an entire business, this isn’t an exception. It’s the operating environment.

For Bilal, success is not about a unicorn label. It’s about infrastructure. “I want Moneco to become the reference for cross-border finance in Africa,” he says. “If you need to import or export, travel, make a payment abroad, I want people to say, ‘I’ll open a Moneco account.’”

“Our opportunity is even bigger on the B2B side,” he says. “Cross-border is so complicated in Africa that it excludes the continent from the global economy. If African businesses were more integrated into global finance, they’d be more integrated into global trade.” That’s the real ambition: not just a consumer app, but a new rail in the system. A way for African individuals and businesses to plug directly into global money flows without going through a maze of legacy intermediaries that were never built for them.

“If one day we can say that Moneco contributed to Africa’s GDP,” Bilal smiles, “that would be incredible.”