Industry
FinTech
Objective
Prestmit found a way around this by enabling instant, borderless delivery, giving people access to global e-commerce platforms, software, and subscriptions without needing an international credit card
If you've ever had to pay for a subscription on international platforms like Amazon, Apple, or Google Play, needed a relative or friend abroad to send you money, or as a freelancer, you had clients who wanted to pay you with gift cards. Prestmit solves that problem for you.
Prestmit was founded in 2018/2019, at a time when everyday payments had few alternatives and were riddled with slow cross-border transactions, declining card usage, high currency conversion fees, and restrictive foreign exchange regulations. Prestmit found a way around this by enabling instant, borderless delivery, giving people access to global e-commerce platforms, software, and subscriptions without needing an international credit card, through gift cards and crypto.
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the Challenge
When Prestmit was around 500,000 users, something interesting happened: they were getting lots of requests in Ghana to facilitate cedi payouts. At first, they met this user demand manually until it started to become impossible to do so. They were relying on a network of individuals, typically liquidity providers through WhatsApp and Telegram messages, to manually transfer funds to user accounts while the company reconciled the records. This approach was extremely unsustainable as transaction volume increased, leading to discrepancies, communication delays, and operational friction.
the Solution
Prestmit was faced with either shutting down their attempt at expanding their operations to Ghana or look for an alternative before they discovered Startbutton. Switching to Startbutton didn't just fix an operational loophole for Prestmit, it unlocked a different category of growth.
the Result
Payouts that once took days of WhatsApp threads and manual coordination were now clear in under five minutes. The transaction ledger replaced the guesswork and manual labour of the team: every payout is logged, traceable, and verifiable. Customer disputes that used to stall operations now get resolved quickly, because the record is right there.
On volume, Prestmit processed 75% more transactions within the same timeframe compared to when they were running operations manually. By the end of 2025, they had grown their cedi transaction volume by 13.7%, surpassing the targets they laid for themselves. The team that was once buried in Telegram messages is now running at a pace that would have been impossible before.
Prestmit currently serves over a million users across Nigeria and Ghana, and that number is growing.
The Ghana expansion almost didn't happen and if it had been abandoned, it would have been for a reason that had nothing to do with demand, the demand was clearly there. It would have been because the infrastructure to serve it didn't exist yet.
That's what Startbutton resolved: not the market problem, but the infrastructure problem sitting in front of it all.
The bigger implication isn't even the 13.7% growth or the five-minute payouts, it's what those things make possible next because the hardest part of cross-border expansion which is managing manual, human-led payouts at scale is now solved at the infrastructure level, Prestmit can turn on new country corridors through a single integration and be operational almost immediately.
What started as a workaround for Ghana has quietly become a template for how Prestmit grows across Africa.
Ready to start selling across Africa without the compliance overhead? [Get started with Startbutton]
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