I own payments at Bujeti, which makes our USD cards my problem to get right. For a long stretch, they weren't.

The numbers were blunt. Of our Tier 3 businesses, only 13% had ever tried a USD card and half of them abandoned it within three months. A product built for businesses that genuinely need dollars, for software, ad spend and international suppliers payments, was being opened and quietly closed.

So we asked the customers why. The answer was singular: our FX conversion cost. Our old exchange rate sat 4–5% above the mid-market rate, while the non-bank fintechs they compared us against charged 1–2%. On the one job the card existed to do, turn Naira into dollars, we were the expensive option.

Here's the uncomfortable part: the high exchange rate wasn’t profiting us. We weren't setting the exchange rate, or even buying the dollars, our USD card provider did both, and we passed their rate straight through. So, the markup lived inside a number we didn't control, nor benefit from. The only way to fix it was to take it over.

So we did something heavier than it sounds for a company our size: we started running treasury ourselves, sourcing our own dollars, setting our own rate, carrying our own risk.

• Where the dollars come from

The cheapest dollar is the one you buy without a middleman. Our liquidity now comes directly from USD holders who want to sell down dollars to fund local operations in naira, their need is the mirror of ours. Matching the two directly removes the layer that used to mark up every dollar we bought.

• Setting a rate we can defend

Sourcing cheaply is half of it; pricing it so we don't quietly bleed is the other half. We build the rate from the cost up, our weighted-average cost of dollars plus a spread size so we can always buy back what we've sold without running at a loss, then benchmark it against the competitor customers named most, aiming to match it or sit just below. We're honest about the ceiling: their scale buys them better FX pricing than we can get today, so this isn't about undercutting blindly.

• Keeping the risk small.

The moment you hold dollars, you hold currency risk. While we're small, we buy in bite-size, frequent purchases, sold through fast, inventory that turns over quickly, so a move in the Naira can't catch us holding. It's more work per dollar, and we take that trade on purpose.

The surprise was the economics. Reselling someone else's rate, we were both expensive and earned nothing, the margin lived at a rate we didn't own. Taking it over flipped both halves at once: the customer pays less, and the spread we set is now ours. We didn't trade margin for price in the usual race to the bottom. We won on price and opened a revenue line, because the money was always the rate-setter's, never the customer's burden or our reward.

What did it do? Over the following 90 days, monthly card spend grew roughly 3x, and the share of cardholders actually using their cards climbed from 18% into the mid-20s. I'll be precise about what that is: the base is small and concentrated, low double-digit active users, a handful of accounts driving most of the volume. I read it as early evidence the diagnosis was right, not proof we've cracked the scale. That comes next.

And it compounds. A competitive rate pulls volume, and volume is what earns better pricing, the very gap I admitted above. It's a capability, too, not a feature: the same engine that prices a card in one direction now runs our newly launched USD accounts in the other, dollars into Naira. We built the hard part once, on cards, and it generalised.

If a single number decides whether customers trust your product here, the cost of a dollar, you can't let someone else set it. Owning treasury was more work and more risk than reselling a rate someone handed us. It was also the only way to own the thing customers were actually leaving over.

If you tried a USD card with us once and left over the rate, you were right to. That reason is gone. Funding one today costs what it should, and it's the simplest way to see what changes when a company decides to own its customers' cost of a dollar. Get Bujeti USD card