“Talent is evenly distributed across the world. Money movement isn’t.”
That idea, from Fred Gyekye Ofosu, Product Operations Manager at Cadana, is at the heart of why the company exists.
A developer in Accra and a designer in Manila are not less capable than their counterparts in London or New York. What stands between them and the job is almost never ability. It is whether the business hiring them can actually pay them.
Cadana was built to remove that question, providing the infrastructure businesses use to pay employees and contractors across the globe. But as Cadana grew, the payments layer underneath it had to grow too.
“You cannot do that for one country. You need rails that can reach everywhere your clients want to hire. Nium helped us extend that reach.”
From manual wires to infrastructure that scales.
In Cadana’s early days, a cross-border payment often meant initiating a Swift wire, one at a time, on top of a handful of local providers.
It worked. It just could not carry the company Cadana was becoming.
“The way we paid people worked, but it was completely unscalable,” said Ofosu. “Looking at what we had then and now, we couldn’t still be doing what we were doing then today.”
Every new market added manual work rather than removing it. Cadana needed reach it did not have to rebuild for. That search led to Nium in 2022.
Reach matters. Reliability matters more.
Cadana works with more than 25 banking and payment partners, often picking a provider for its strength in a single corridor. Nium stood out for the opposite reason: breadth.
“A client might ask us to pay someone in Belize or New Zealand — not just the major markets everyone supports,” said Ofosu. “Nium has coverage in those long-tail countries, too.”
Coverage alone is not enough when the money moving is somebody’s salary. Cadana evaluates every partner on reach, commercials, settlement times and, critically, what happens when a payment gets stuck. A delayed transaction is not an operational exception. It is a person waiting to be paid.
“Reliability at scale is one of the biggest things we’ve gained from working with Nium. We can confidently tell our users they’ll get their funds within a certain number of hours — and it’s delivered.”
Cadana’s settlement success rate with Nium has remained above 95% as payout volumes have grown.
Turn on a market, don’t rebuild for one.
Cadana integrated with Nium’s APIs once, at a wholesale level. Adding a country since then has been a configuration question, not an engineering project.
“If we need to turn on a country today, it’s about enabling that country rather than going through a whole new engineering or API project,” said Ofosu.
That difference showed up sharply when an issue with another provider created an urgent need for a new corridor. Checking the documentation, Ofosu found Nium already supported the market. He asked Cadana’s CTO how fast it could go live. The answer was a couple of hours, with no call to an engineer required.
“It gives us a lot more confidence to tell a client: yes, we can support this, and here’s the timeframe.”
Growing fast, and staying dependable while doing it.
Since the partnership began, Cadana’s payout volumes have grown close to tenfold. But volume is not the number Ofosu reaches for first.
“You have this ability to grow or scale and still maintain the reliability that comes with it,” he said. “A lot of the time that is underrated.”
For the people on the receiving end, it is anything but. In markets where workers have few reliable ways to receive international earnings, dependable payout infrastructure is often what makes the remote job possible at all.
“They are getting their funds on time, in the periods they are expecting,” said Ofosu. “That’s the impact on the user.”
Building toward a world where payment is never the blocker.
Cadana is pushing deeper into LATAM and Asia, where volumes have already grown three to fourfold, and testing whether stablecoin settlement can take the lag out of its own funding flows.
"Today we send USD, and sometimes there are delays because the funds need to clear before we're credited," said Ofosu. "Stablecoins cut out some of that time."
New rails, same ambition as the one the company started with. Every corridor Cadana opens is another place a business can hire without first stopping to ask whether it can pay.
"Our clients should be able to hire anywhere. Payment should never be the issue," stated Ofosu.
To learn more about what Cadana built with with Nium, check out its customer story here >
