A Conversation With Shalom Osiadi, CEO And Founder Of Esca

We sat down with Shalom Osiadi, Founder and CEO of Esca, about building cross-border payment infrastructure to help businesses manage currency volatility, reduce transaction costs and navigate Africa’s emerging markets.

Tell Us About Esca

Esca provides enterprise-grade currency management and cross-border payment infrastructure for businesses with multinational operations. We help companies move, hold and convert value across borders, across both fiat currencies and digital assets.

When building Esca, we focused on supporting businesses with exposure to emerging markets, particularly in Africa. Our customers range from global enterprises entering African markets and logistics businesses collecting payments locally, to NGOs moving donor funds into field operations and mining companies managing local payouts. The core issue is simple, and has always been the same – it doesn’t matter which industry the business operates in: they earn in one currency, pay in another, and lose time, value and visibility in between. Esca was built to solve this problem.

What Makes Esca Unique?

When we built Esca, we purposefully developed the product with emerging-market realities in mind, rather than simply adapting to their ever-evolving needs. Most of the existing cross-border infrastructure was initially designed for stable, highly liquid corridors and later extended into emerging markets, such as Africa, as an afterthought. Whilst it was helpful for them to have a starting point, these rails were unsuitable for the financial landscape in Africa, particularly negatively impacting our customer base.

For our customers, volatility, thin liquidity and wide spreads are the starting conditions, not edge cases. In October, for example, the Malawian Kwacha started the month quoted almost 1,000 kwacha apart between buy and sell. These details rarely make headlines, but they show up in every invoice and payroll run, so we build around them.

We’re also unique in the way that we work across fiat and digital assets, and across local and global payment rails. Because Esca started in stablecoin engineering, we treat digital assets as working infrastructure rather than a talking point. They are an efficient and additional way to move value quickly and reliably where traditional rails are slow or expensive. What’s more, our mission is rooted in the cost of transactions, ensuring transparent pricing and rates are at the heart of what we do.

What Is Your Advice To Aspiring Entrepreneurs?

Stay close to the problem. The strongest products come from understanding what customers are actually struggling with, even when they cannot yet describe the solution they need. Our customers rarely ask for “programmable multi-currency infrastructure”; they ask how to pay an invoice on time or stop losing money between earning and converting – that’s where we started, and continue to work.

It’s also important to identify and protect your focus. As a business grows, it is easy to get pulled in too many directions: new markets, new partners, new product ideas. All of it is exciting, but sustained focus on the core problem is what actually drives growth.

Overall, always be ready for the long road. In a regulated, trust-based industry like payments, nothing happens overnight, and resilience really matters. Every founder faces setbacks, and will continue to do so throughout their career. Don’t let this alter your dedication to the cause!

What most excites you about Esca?

Too much enterprise finance, especially in emerging markets, still runs on disconnected accounts, manual spreadsheets and slow payment processes. I am excited that we are building the alternative: programmable, multi-currency infrastructure that gives companies control at the speed their business actually runs.

What excites me most, though, is the impact. For a business operating in a volatile market, the ability to manage currency risk, access liquidity and pay people on time is the difference between planning with confidence and constantly reacting. Giving businesses in those
markets the confidence to grow, trade and plan globally is about more than fintech innovation, and that is what gets me up in the morning.

How Has the Company Evolved Over the Last Couple of Years?

The biggest lesson from our early days is that the problem customers have is often not the one you set out to solve. Esca began as Esca Menu, a food delivery platform in Nigeria that offered restaurants crypto cashback. Many restaurants ended up ordering from themselves, using the cashback to protect their revenue from a naira that fell from around 300 to roughly 1,800 to the dollar.

They didn’t need another delivery app; they needed to protect what they earned. So we moved into hedging, and after a partner copied our idea, we learned to own our roadmap. Today we are a pure software business.

Esca Finance is now a hedging and payments ecosystem that helps businesses in established and emerging markets protect their revenue against currency fluctuations and devaluation. Customers from global enterprises to logistics firms, NGOs and mining companies use Esca to move, hold and convert value across borders, fiat currencies and digital assets.

What Can We Hope To See from Esca In the Future?

More focus on protecting African businesses from currency volatility, because that is where the need is sharpest. A business can win a contract, deliver the work and still lose money because the local currency moved between invoicing and getting paid. We have seen the Naira go from around 300 to the dollar to roughly 1,800, and even in calmer months, swings around central bank decisions and inflation data can decide which side of the market a business lands on.

The cost is not just the exchange rate. In many African corridors, the gap between buy and sell prices is wide, and liquidity is often the first thing to disappear when global markets get nervous. That cost shows up in every invoice and payroll run. So, you can expect Esca to keep building tools that give African businesses more control: easier access to USD, EUR and GBP, transparent pricing, and simple ways to set rules for when and how they convert, rather than relying on guesswork.