Andrew Takyi-Appiah founded Zeepay in Accra in 2014, betting that Africa’s mobile money wallets — not bank accounts — were the fastest route for diaspora cash to reach home.
More than a decade later, the company he built into one of the continent’s most recognizable remittance brands is seemingly fighting multiple fires: a collapsed Caribbean subsidiary, a multimillion-dollar court judgment against its chief executive personally, and a creditor trying to force it into liquidation.
Still in operation, the embattled fintech has to navigate a tricky balance of legal obstacles and public image repairs.
From Bank Wallets to Diaspora Rails
Takyi-Appiah, a banker with stints at Barclays in Ghana and the U.K. before working in payments at WorldRemit, launched Zeepay to solve a narrow problem: getting remittances from abroad settled directly into local mobile money wallets rather than requiring recipients to visit a bank or agent.
The company built termination agreements with major money transfer operators, including Western Union, MoneyGram, Ria, Visa and Mastercard, letting it plug into existing international transfer networks rather than compete with them directly.
Growth followed a familiar African fintech script: start in one market, prove the model, then replicate it across borders.
Zeepay expanded from Ghana into Zambia, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone and the Gambia, eventually operating in more than 20 countries. In April 2020, it became the first Ghanaian-owned company to receive an Electronic Money Issuer license from the Bank of Ghana, a milestone the company used to burnish its regulatory credentials.
Investors Bought In
Capital followed the expansion. Zeepay raised a $7.9 million Series A round in mid-2021, followed by a $10 million Series A.5 extension in 2022 led by Symbiotics, and further rounds from Africa50, Oikocredit, Injaro Investments and Verdant Capital Hybrid Fund through 2023 and 2024.
By its own account, the company had raised roughly $23 million to $26 million in equity since inception, with additional debt financing — including an $18 million facility in 2025 — pushing total funding past the $50 million mark by some counts.
The company processed over 10 million remittance transactions worth more than $3 billion in 2023 alone, a scale that positioned it as a genuine infrastructure player rather than a niche app.
In 2021, Zeepay pushed into the Caribbean, establishing a Barbados subsidiary called Zeemoney and pitching the island as a bridge for remittances flowing between the African diaspora and the continent, with promises of thousands of local jobs.
The Forex Breach in Ghana
The first serious crack appeared in November 2023, when the Bank of Ghana fined Zeepay Ghana and suspended its forex license for 11 days for breaching foreign exchange regulations. Regulators found the company had failed to convert inbound remittance funds using the official average interbank exchange rate, violating Ghana’s Foreign Exchange Act.
Zeepay said its general operating license was unaffected and that it was working with the central bank to resolve the matter; the suspension was lifted after roughly two weeks, and the company later said the issue had been resolved.
At the time, it looked like a compliance stumble rather than a structural problem. In hindsight, it was the first in a lengthening list.
Barbados Collapses
In May 2026, the Central Bank of Barbados suspended Zeemoney’s license after a supervisory review raised concerns about the subsidiary’s financial condition, governance, regulatory compliance and operational continuity. The suspension barred Zeemoney from conducting any money transmission business and gave the company a deadline to fix the identified problems.
Rather than resolve them, Zeemoney applied to voluntarily wind up its four Barbados locations. The subsidiary had operated branches in Warrens, Speightstown, Hastings and the Sheraton Mall Annex, serving both Barbadians and foreign nationals.
Customers were told only that they would be informed “in due course” how to recover funds held in Zeemoney wallets and accounts — an open-ended timeline that left users of the service in limbo. What was once pitched as a 10,000-job gateway between Africa and the Caribbean diaspora ended in an unwinding overseen by regulators, not by design.
Ghana Courts Add Pressure
The Caribbean exit landed alongside two separate legal fights at home.
A creditor, Obsidian Achernar Ltd, filed a petition in Accra’s High Court seeking to wind up Zeepay entirely over an unpaid debt tied to a 2024 foreign exchange and working capital agreement. The petition claims total exposure of roughly $2.4 million and GHS 567,000, alleging Zeepay defaulted on a structured repayment plan after settling only part of what it owed.
More striking is a ruling in a separate case brought by businessman Michael Yusuf. Ghana’s High Court Commercial Division ordered Zeepay and Takyi-Appiah personally to pay more than $11.6 million over funds Yusuf had deposited for onward transfer that were never sent — money the court found had gone partly into the personal mobile wallet of the company’s chief executive.
Judge Afi Agbanu Kudomor rejected an attempt by Zeepay’s lawyers to remove Takyi-Appiah from the case, finding the company and its CEO had failed to mount a credible defense. Zeepay has appealed and asked the public to treat media coverage of the case with caution while it remains before the Court of Appeal.
What It Signals
None of the individual episodes — a forex fine, a Caribbean license suspension, a contested debt, a disputed judgment — is unheard of for a fast-growing fintech operating across multiple regulatory regimes. Taken together, over roughly 30 months, they raise a harder question: whether Zeepay’s compliance and treasury functions kept pace with its geographic ambitions.
Zeepay’s core Ghanaian operations remain active, and the company continues to describe itself as operating in more than 20 markets. But the gap between the growth story it told investors — unicorn ambitions, a $200 billion revenue target, a Caribbean beachhead — and the governance concerns now cited by two separate central banks and a Ghanaian court is difficult to reconcile.
