Nomba, the Lagos-headquartered fintech, has secured a $3 million debt facility from CardinalStone Finance Company Limited to expand its cross-border payments infrastructure between Africa and Asia, according to Nairametrics.
The raise is structured as debt rather than equity, a deliberate choice that lets Nomba scale its balance sheet for payment flows without diluting existing shareholders. CardinalStone Finance Company Limited — the lending arm of Nigerian investment bank CardinalStone — is the sole facility provider named in the deal.
Nomba has carved out a position in Nigeria's competitive merchant payments market, offering point-of-sale terminals, agency banking, and business banking tools to small and medium enterprises. The company previously raised a $30 million Series B round in 2022 led by Base10 Partners, with participation from Helios Investment Partners and others, bringing its total known equity funding to roughly $35 million before this new facility. The $3 million debt tranche is modest in absolute terms but operationally significant: cross-border payment corridors require liquidity on both ends of a transaction, and working-capital debt is often the right instrument for that.
The Africa-Asia trade corridor is the specific target. Intra-African and Africa-Asia commerce has grown steadily as Chinese manufacturers, Indian exporters, and Southeast Asian platforms deepen ties with Nigerian and broader West African importers. Nomba's bet is that merchants who already use its domestic payment stack will want a seamless way to settle with Asian suppliers — eliminating the correspondent banking friction and foreign-exchange delays that currently plague those corridors. The World Bank has repeatedly flagged sub-Saharan Africa as carrying some of the world's highest remittance and trade-payment costs, making the problem Nomba is targeting both real and large.
The timing puts Nomba in direct competition with a cluster of fintechs attacking the same corridor from different angles. Leatherback, Nala, and LemFi each offer Africa-linked cross-border transfer products, while global players like Thunes and Nium have signed African bank and fintech partnerships to move trade payments. What differentiates a merchant-focused approach — Nomba's likely angle — is embedding the cross-border settlement directly into a business's existing payment workflow, rather than asking a trader to open a separate transfer account.
CardinalStone's involvement is notable for a second reason: it signals that Nigerian institutional lenders are becoming more comfortable extending credit to fintechs for specific, asset-like use cases such as payment float and corridor liquidity. Equity capital from international venture funds has slowed across African tech since 2023, making domestic debt facilities from banks and finance companies an increasingly important source of growth capital for post-Series B companies that need operational firepower without another equity round.
Nomba's broader financials — revenue, transaction volume, active merchant count — have not been disclosed in the current reporting. The company's 2022 Series B materials cited tens of thousands of active merchants and significant POS terminal deployments across Nigeria, but updated figures are not yet public. Investors and partners evaluating the company's trajectory will want to see how its merchant base has grown in the intervening years and whether the Asia corridor product can generate fee income that services the new debt.
Why it matters: A $3 million debt facility is small on its own, but it marks Nomba's first public move into cross-border infrastructure — a higher-margin, structurally underserved market — and demonstrates that Nigerian institutional lenders are willing to back fintech corridor plays at a moment when venture equity for African startups remains constrained.