I built a payments SDK for African fintechs over 8 months — here’s what I learned

Left my job at a big fintech to build in stealth. Now open-sourcing everything. Handled FX volatility, mobile money edge cases, and KYC requirements across a dozen African markets.

The hardest technical problem wasn’t payments at all — it was reconciling mobile money callbacks across different carriers in the same transaction lifecycle. Every provider’s webhook timing behaves slightly differently under load, and none of the documentation tells you that upfront.

If you’re building anything payments-adjacent for this market, budget three times longer than you think for the reconciliation layer. Everything else is comparatively straightforward.