Mitch Riley, Co-founder and CEO, Capi

Today we're delighted to speak with Mitch Riley, co-founder and CEO of Capi, the London and Paris-headquartered fintech building the business account for emerging markets trade. With teams across seven African cities and over $1bn in annual payment volume, Mitch shares how Capi is fixing the broken correspondent banking system that holds back SME importers across the continent.

My questions are in bold – over to you Mitch:

Who are you and what's your background?

I'm Mitch Riley, co-founder and CEO of Capi. Before this I was COO, CFO and General Counsel at Taptap Send, a fintech unicorn moving billions of dollars a year in remittances into emerging markets — that's really where I first saw, up close, how broken cross-border money movement still is for the continent. I met my co-founder, Scott Liddle, here — Scott ran growth (CRO/CMO) and together we supported the launch of 25 markets across Africa, Asia and Latin America. Before Taptap, I spent over four years setting up new markets and running field operations across Africa and Latin America for GiveDirectly, the cash-transfer NGO. And before that I was a lawyer at Cravath in New York.

What is your job title and what are your general responsibilities?

I'm co-founder and CEO. Day to day I run the functions that let us move over $1bn a year in payments (banking, operations, legal, and compliance and finance), plus strategy, fundraising, and people. I spend a lot of time with our exec team and our teams in-market, because a business like ours lives or dies on execution across a lot of very different countries at once.

Can you give us an overview of your business?

Capi is building the business account for emerging markets trade. Our mission is to bring global neobank standards to markets where the financial system is broken.

We started with payments for importers, letting emerging market businesses pay their international suppliers faster and with far more confidence than a traditional bank gives them. A bank might take a week or more to settle an international payment, with little to no visibility while you wait. We settle in a fraction of that time, give customers a live dashboard to track every payment, and let them buy foreign currency online 24/7.

On top of payments rails we've added wallets, so businesses can hold local and foreign currency ahead of an invoice payment, and we've just launched cards.

We're a post-Series A company headquartered in London and Paris, with teams on the ground in Dakar, Abidjan, Douala, Accra, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, and Lagos.

Tell us how you are funded?

We're VC-backed. Our Series A was led by Creandum, and we've raised more than $18m in total from some of the best investors in Europe and beyond, including Y Combinator, Firstminute Capital, Janngo, and Kima Ventures, plus angel investors from Revolut, Checkout.com, Stripe, Onfido and Remitly.

What's the origin story? Why did you start the company? To solve what problems?

Scott and I both spent years at Taptap Send building consumer remittances into emerging markets — and the more time we spent in-market, the more obvious it became that the businesses around those consumers were being left behind. A huge amount of innovation has gone into making it easy for a person to send $200 home to their family. Almost none of it has gone into helping an importer pay their supplier in China or Europe for a shipping container of goods their whole business depends on. Those businesses are still stuck relying on correspondent banking that can take seven to ten days, opaque FX rates, and banks that treat SME importers as an afterthought. Every day of delay is a day of lost revenue or stalled inventory for them. We started Capi to fix that specific problem: giving SME importers in emerging markets a fast, transparent way to pay the suppliers their businesses run on.

Our very first customer says it all, really: a Senegalese chain of bookshops, whose first invoices we processed back in July 2023 — including, memorably, an order for a dozen copies of Mario Kart for Nintendo Switch. At that point Capi was four people, tracking everything on a spreadsheet. Three years on we're moving over $1bn a year for hundreds of importers. The problem hasn't changed; we've just gotten a lot better at solving it at scale.

Who are your target customers? What's your revenue model?

We work with SME importers across Africa, plus multinational companies needing to move money to/from headquarters, and partners like remittance companies, international NGOs, and exporters selling into these markets.

Our platform is free to use for customers; we make money on the FX margin when a customer converts currency to pay a supplier. What I hear consistently from customers is that speed is what keeps them with us. One importer in Côte d'Ivoire told our team that literally 100% of their payments are urgent, because the moment a supplier is paid is the moment goods start moving.

If you had a magic wand, what one thing would you change in the banking and/or FinTech sector?

I'd fix correspondent banking for emerging markets. The rails that move money into and out of Africa are still built on a decades-old correspondent banking model that wasn't designed for the volume or urgency of trade today. It's slow, it's opaque, it's expensive, and it disproportionately punishes the SMEs that can least afford the delay. If I could wave a wand, I'd want SME importers in Dakar or Douala to have access to the same speed and transparency for international payments that a business in London or Paris takes for granted with neobanks like Revolut, Wise, and Airwallex.

What is your message for the larger players in the Financial Services marketplace?

Don't write off emerging markets as too small or too risky to serve well. They're some of the fastest-growing economies in the world, and their SMEs are the engines of GDP growth and job creation. The banks and fintechs that figure out how to serve them properly, with real local presence and modern infrastructure, are going to build enormous, durable businesses.

Where do you get your Financial Services/FinTech industry news from?

A mix of the trade press and LinkedIn, if I'm honest. The FT, TechCrunch and FinTech Futures are regulars for me, but a lot of what actually shapes my thinking day to day comes from what operators, founders, and the Capi team are posting and reacting to on LinkedIn in the moment, rather than any single publication.

Can you list 3 people you rate from the FinTech and/or Financial Services sector that we should be following on LinkedIn, and why?

Jack Zhang, a fellow Aussie who has built Airwallex. They were one of the first to tackle the thorny problem of cross-border payments for businesses, and it's probably the closest product out there to what we're building at Capi. His thinking on scaling payments infrastructure is essential reading for us as we take on an even more broken system in Africa.

Tom Blomfield, for putting UK fintech on the map, first with GoCardless and then Monzo. Tom wasn't our YC partner but he's always been incredibly generous with his time. He's refreshingly raw, direct and honest about what it actually takes to build a billion-dollar company and be an effective leader, including the bits that didn't go to plan.

Benji Fernandes, founder and CEO of NALA. He went from TV presenter in Tanzania to Stanford to building NALA, the first East African fintech in Y Combinator. He's a close friend, and there aren't many other founders building in Africa, so it's great to have someone to swap notes with on what's hard, what's working and the lessons learned along the way.

What FinTech services (and/or apps) do you personally use?

I'm a sucker for trying new apps! I've tried every remittance app and challenger bank but Wise and Revolut are the two stand-outs for me.

What's the best new FinTech product or service you've seen recently?

Instinct (not strictly fintech, but can be used for agentic finance stuff). It's a personal AI agent you just text, and it actually goes off and does things for you across your accounts rather than just answering questions (raised $1bn from Sequoia, Benchmark and Coatue in a Series C this year). It's amazing, and I think it's a glimpse of where finance is heading, with agents handling payments, approvals and money movement on your behalf, so the rails underneath need to be ready for that.

Finally, let's talk predictions. What trends do you think are going to define the next few years in the FinTech sector?

First, I think we'll see continued unbundling of correspondent banking, with regulated non-bank players building direct, compliant rails into emerging markets rather than routing everything through a shrinking number of correspondent banks.

Second, I think we'll see more local-currency stablecoins, which will help drive stablecoin adoption and make on/offramping smoother.

And third, we'll see the first IPOs of African fintechs and increased investor interest in emerging market fintech.

Many thanks to Mitch for taking the time to share his insights with FinTech Profile. You can learn more about Capi on their website.