Welcome to Sente: A Payments Platform Built for Africa

Sente takes its name from ssente, the Luganda word for money. It is a fitting name for what we are building: one way to move money across Africa — on any phone, on any rail, in any market.

This is the first post on our blog, so it is a good place to explain what Sente is, why we think the world needs it, how it is built and what comes next.

Why we are building Sente

Africa leads the world in mobile money. Hundreds of millions of people send, receive and save money from their phones, many of them without ever having held a bank account. It is one of the great success stories of modern finance.

But that success sits on fragmented foundations. Money in one mobile wallet often cannot reach a wallet on another network without being cashed out first. Sending money to a neighbouring country is slow, opaque and expensive — Sub-Saharan Africa is the most expensive region in the world to send money to, according to the World Bank. Fraud, from SIM swaps to fake identities, drains accounts, and protection is patchy. Businesses reconcile payments from a dozen channels by hand. And every market has its own rules, which most providers bolt on after the fact.

The people who pay for all of this are the people least able to afford it: the market trader paying suppliers across the border, the worker sending money home, the family saving for school fees.

We believe moving money in Africa should be as simple and as cheap as sending a text message. That is the problem Sente exists to solve.

Not just an app — a platform

Sente has an app, and we are proud of it. But the app is only one way in. Underneath it is a platform: one set of services, one set of safety checks and one ledger, shared by every way people and businesses reach us.

Ways in

• The Sente app on Android and iOS, for sending, paying, saving and getting paid — with Amani, an assistant that prepares payments in plain words and never moves money until you confirm.
• USSD, for anyone with any phone, no data required.
• Agents, who turn cash into digital money and back again in their neighbourhoods.
• Merchant checkout, for taking payment in a shop or online.
• A developer API, so other businesses can build their own products on Sente.

What the platform provides

• Payments infrastructure: transfers, payments and payouts across mobile money, banks, cards, PAPSS and stablecoins, through one API.
• Fraud and risk protection: every payment scored in real time, with explainable decisions and rules that can change without a code release.
• Identity and KYC: document checks, sanctions screening and tiered accounts, with personal data kept in the customer's own country.
• Custom solutions: for banks, telcos, saccos and MFIs that want to build their own products on the same rails.

Every one of those channels and products posts to the same double-entry ledger. A payment made at an agent's counter, by USSD or through a partner's app is one record, visible everywhere it should be.

The principles we build by

Moving money for other people is a serious responsibility. A few principles, enforced in code and in review, guide everything we build.

Every balance is derived, never edited

Money movements are recorded as immutable double-entry postings whose debits and credits always net to zero. Balances are calculated from those postings, so every figure can be explained and rebuilt. We wrote about why in Why a Double-Entry Ledger Matters.

No floating-point money

Every amount is an integer number of the currency's smallest unit, with its currency code. Rounding errors don't creep in, and currencies are never mixed by accident.

Strict consistency where money moves

Every write that touches money runs at the database's strictest isolation level, and every money-moving request carries an idempotency key so it happens exactly once, however many times a flaky network makes a client retry. More in Idempotency Keys.

Privacy by design

Personal information is tokenised in the country it belongs to, in line with laws such as Kenya's Data Protection Act and Nigeria's NDPA, before anything reaches shared systems. Secrets, PINs and card numbers are never written to logs.

Safe automation

Business rules — limits, fees, compliance checks — are stored as data and evaluated by a safe interpreter, never as code that could be executed. Our AI assistant can propose payments, but it cannot move money: only the customer's own confirmation can.

Built for the network people actually have

We design for basic phones and patchy 2G first. If something works there, it works everywhere. Our USSD design is a good example: Building for Intermittent Connectivity.

How it is built

Sente is a set of focused services, each written in the language best suited to its job:

• The core money services — ledger, identity, compliance, FX, cards, transfers and settlement — are written in C# on .NET, for correctness and performance under load.
• Ingestion, USSD, notifications, analytics, fraud models and partner integrations are written in Python, so we can move quickly with providers and data.
• Everything people see — the mobile app, the merchant dashboard, the developer portal and this website — is written in TypeScript.

The services share contracts generated from a single definition, so the money-moving core, the integrations and the apps always agree on what a payment looks like.

Where we are

Sente is live in Kenya and Nigeria, and supports Ghana, South Africa, Uganda, Tanzania and Zimbabwe, with more corridors coming. The app is available in ten languages.

Our goal is to bring the cost of moving money below 1% — a target we are building towards, not a price we offer today — by connecting rails directly instead of routing money through chains of intermediaries. We explain how in The State of Cross-Border Payments in Africa.

Get involved

• For people and businesses: request early access and tell us where you are and how you move money today.
• For developers: the developer guide takes you from a free account to your first sandbox payment.
• For banks, telcos, saccos and MFIs: talk to us about custom solutions on Sente's rails.
• For everyone: follow this blog, and find us on X, YouTube and GitHub.

We are just getting started. Thank you for reading — and welcome to Sente.