Mastercard ties up with Yellow Card to push stablecoin rails across EEMEA, opens with five-country pilot

Mastercard said on Wednesday it has signed a partnership with African crypto-payments operator Yellow Card to roll out stablecoin-based payment infrastructure across Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Pilots begin in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates.

The announcement landed on May 7. It is Mastercard’s deepest commercial bet yet on dollar-denominated stablecoins as a settlement layer in markets where correspondent banking is thin and dollar liquidity is scarce. Yellow Card, founded in 2019 and licensed across 20 African countries, will plug into Mastercard’s network for cross-border remittances, business-to-business settlement, treasury services and digital loyalty programmes built on stablecoin rails. Both companies said the partnership will expand globally over time.

Mastercard (MA) shares closed at $491.89 on Wednesday, down 1.04 per cent, before recovering 0.19 per cent in pre-market trading on Thursday to $492.56, according to MoneyCheck.

What the deal covers

The companies named four use cases: cross-border remittances, B2B settlement, digital loyalty, and corporate treasury. Yellow Card will handle the on-ramp and off-ramp between local fiat currencies and dollar-pegged stablecoins, including USDC and USDT, which dominate African crypto-payment flows. Mastercard contributes its network, compliance tooling, and Crypto Credential identity layer.

The five launch markets share two structural traits: dollar shortages and high remittance costs. Sub-Saharan Africa carries the world’s most expensive remittance corridors, with the World Bank pegging average fees at around 8 per cent for a $200 transfer in 2024. The UAE was added to the launch list as the corridor’s other end, given the Emirates’ role as a wage-remittance hub for African workers.

Chris Maurice, chief executive and co-founder of Yellow Card, said in the announcement that “emerging markets represent the greatest opportunity for payment innovation, but success requires deep local expertise.” Mete Güney, executive vice president for market development across EEMEA at Mastercard, said: “Stablecoins are an exciting and useful option for some payments, and we look forward to working on additional use cases.”

How the rails fit together

The deal sits inside a wider Mastercard stablecoin programme. Over the past 18 months the company has built out its Multi-Token Network, the tokenised-asset settlement layer that ran a recent cross-border pilot with JPMorgan’s Kinexys unit, Ripple and Ondo Finance using tokenised US Treasuries on the XRP Ledger. The Yellow Card tie-up extends that infrastructure into consumer and SME payments rather than wholesale settlement.

Yellow Card’s footprint is what makes the deal credible operationally. The Atlanta- and Lagos-based firm has, since 2019, built licensed corridors in Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, South Africa, Botswana, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon, Malawi, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia, among others. It processes stablecoin flows for treasury operations at multinational businesses operating across the continent. The firm raised a $33 million Series B in September 2022 led by Polychain Capital. Maurice has positioned the company as a regulated alternative to peer-to-peer over-the-counter desks that previously moved much of Africa’s crypto volume offshore.

Why now

Mastercard is moving on stablecoins under competitive pressure. Visa has already expanded its USDC settlement programme to multiple banks. PayPal has issued its own stablecoin, PYUSD. Stripe acquired Bridge, a stablecoin payments infrastructure firm, in October 2024 for a reported $1.1 billion, the largest crypto deal of that year. Each move chipped at the assumption that card networks own the cross-border payment stack outright.

Regulatory cover has also improved. The European Union’s MiCA framework is in force. The UAE has built a stablecoin licensing track through the Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority in Dubai and the Financial Services Regulatory Authority in Abu Dhabi. Several African central banks, notably the Central Bank of Nigeria and the Bank of Ghana, have moved from outright crypto bans toward licensing experiments. That shift gave both sides of the Mastercard-Yellow Card deal a regulatory perimeter to work within.

What’s next

Pilots in the five launch markets begin in the second half of 2026, with global expansion to follow, the companies said. Neither side disclosed financial terms or transaction volume targets. Mastercard’s Move cross-border money-movement product will likely sit alongside the Yellow Card rails as a settlement option, though the announcement did not formally name Mastercard Move as the routing layer.

Two questions hang over the rollout. The first is whether USDC and USDT, both issued offshore by Circle and Tether respectively, can satisfy the bank-grade compliance standards Mastercard’s institutional partners will demand. The second is whether merchants and SMEs in the launch markets, where mobile-money platforms M-Pesa in Kenya and MTN MoMo across West Africa already dominate, will route flows through stablecoin rails instead of the rails they already trust.

Yellow Card’s Maurice has bet for six years that they will. On Wednesday, Mastercard joined that bet.