'Crypto Is Not The Future, It's Very Much The Now'

Broadening the financial services landscape from Lagos, Chris Maurice is the 26-year-old helming one of Africa's fastest-growing cryptocurrency companies.

For the past two years, the theme in the financial services sector has been the evolution of digital payment systems.

Cryptocurrency exchange company, Yellow Card Financial, is a part of this growing sector with Chris Maurice as the company’s CEO and co-founder.

Growing up in New Orleans in Louisiana, United States, Maurice loved trading cards, and that led to him selling them online. This is what largely paid for his studies at Auburn University in Alabama.

“I think the entrepreneurial journey for me started in fifth grade,” Maurice says. “I would have been like 10 or 11. And basically, I got access to my dad’s eBay account and just started selling Pokémon cards.”

It was the beginning of a life that would lead to West Africa–even though, at the time, he didn’t know where Nigeria was on the map.

“When I was about what 21 I met a Nigerian guy at Wells Fargo [American financial services company] who was sending 200 bucks to his family and the bank charged him $90. And I was like, ‘oh my God, this is absurd’. And that sort of started me down this journey which eventually led me to Lagos.”