🇰🇪🇮🇹 Last week I ran my business development from the Kenyan coast. The photos aren’t stock (those of us who work in travel are lucky that way: our offices occasionally look like this). But I wasn’t there for the view; I was there for the money, and for why it still moves so badly.
Sit down with a tour operator in Watamu, a fintech founder in Mombasa, and an FX veteran in Kilifi, and you get one story told three ways. A European guest books a Kenyan lodge: the trip crosses one border, while the money crosses several (currencies, banks and regulators that don’t agree), so commissions arrive late, or disputed, or quietly shaved by fees, and the corridors that matter most for tourism, such as the ones between Africa and Europe, are precisely the ones SWIFT prices out.
What’s striking, whether you run a hotel or a payments company, is that the rails to fix this already exist. Stablecoins became actual means of payment for real-life, industrial scenarios in 2025, not as speculation but as plumbing the guest never sees, and local on- and off-ramps are live in Kenya today. There’s routinely conferences about it all over African capitals: I’ve spoken at some. What’s been missing isn’t the technology; it’s the unglamorous layer on top, the one that nets commissions, guarantees them, settles in minutes instead of sometimes months, and leaves a single record both sides can actually read (the real numbers, in other words, rather than the hype).
That layer is what we’ve been quietly running since March, and it’s probably time I stopped being coy about it: it’s called Transio, cross-border settlement infrastructure for travel, live in pilot between Kenya and Europe. Money only ever moves between licensed institutions (we never hold it), and we don’t compete with the rail builders: we orchestrate them.
It serves Travel Token Marketplace GmbH of course, but it reaches well past travel: those same corridors carry the agribusiness and trade deals that come up every few weeks at the inAfrica Club, where like-minded people find ways to enable projects: my humble contribution being to let the value move. As an Italian betting his next chapter on Africa, I’d argue our two continents are going to need each other more, not less, in the decades ahead. The trade is ready; the money should keep up.
If you run a hotel, a corridor, or a deal the banks won’t price, reach out and let’s talk, starting by transio.network
In the pictures: comparing notes on what actually works with Maheer, Alex, Aly, plus the Nairobi rounds.
