The importance of being urgent

Jem Shaw, 20 November 2025

As we fire digital wads of money across the globe, it's all too easy to forget just what that money is doing. A shipment of bicycle pedals to Zambia is a pretty prosaic item, but it allows Kabwe to build bicycles, for which he gets paid, meaning that he can buy his daughter a bicycle of her own. And sometimes the effects can be still more significant.

A couple of years ago we were involved in helping a major charity move funds into Myanmar, almost the definition of a challenging destination. Torn since 2021 by civil war and heavily sanctioned to restrict access to weapons, its population, and the aid workers struggling to help them, are faced with a daily fight for survival. To successfully and compliantly land funds there required meticulous documentation and tracking, plus a connected network to negotiate the transfers. It can be done, and we did it, but sometimes time becomes much more of the essence...

An urgent call from the charity informed us that their staff were trapped by advancing rebels. An aircraft had been located to extract them, but $15,000 in physical bills needed to be available within the next few hours. In such a circumstance, breaking a few rules might be forgiven later, but that couldn't be guaranteed. Fortunately, the banknotes were in place within four hours. Staff were rescued, with neither aid workers nor regulations being injured in the process.

Not all of our operations are as exciting, but each, in its own way, is as important. Kabwe's daughter's first wobble into independent progress is a metaphor for emerging economies all over the world. We should keep her, and them, in our minds.

Comprehensive documentation is an essential component of meeting the challenges posed by such regions, but unless it can be instantly shared across a connected, interacting network, then its value is greatly diminished. In the case of the Myanmar aid workers, a single request for information could have meant captivity or even death. But transfer that thinking to Kabwe's employers. They need to import components to build the bicycles to pay the wages of Kabwe and his colleagues. These are real people in a country that's striving for self-sufficiency and decent living standards.

We work with many African market stall holders who import goods from China for resale. They need to settle payment before goods can be shipped, generally without the convenience of stablecoins, which are unacceptable to Chinese regulators. Then they need delay-free shipment to restore cashflow though sales. Fortunately the CertiQi platform connects them automatically to a connected mesh of banks, NBFIs, FX providers and AML intelligence companies. Communication and document sharing are instant and rapid settlement can follow. Compliance departments can compare bills of lading with invoices, making informed decisions on rational pricing, weights and dimensions.

The Myanmar case added a new element to diligence. In most international payments, only the source of funds is subject to due diligemce by the counterparties; KYC on the beneficiary is the responsibility of the receiving bank, which should have properly onboarded its customer. In the disarrayed confusion of a war zone this is rarely possible. The flexibility of open but secure information pathways allowed us to trace and document every stage, from digital to physical cash, to receipt and invoice-matching with the aircraft operators.

Compliance regulations exist to protect all of us from wrongdoers, but they can delay and sometimes prevent perfectly sound and legal transactions. Some fintechs and MTOs have conceived workarounds that, while not in themselves of negative intent, sometimes give rise to discrepancies and losses experienced by well-regulated countries. Ghana's discrepancies in 2018 to 2022 demonstrate that even well-intentioned opacity can have disastrous consequences. Instead, we have to embrace the transparency that effective compliance demands and work to accommodate it efficiently.

And remind ourselves that it helps small girls to learn to ride a bike.