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Benjamin Fernandes
Founder & Chief Executive Officer
NALA
Benjamin Fernandes is an award-winning Tanzanian entrepreneur and global payments leader building stablecoin-based financial infrastructure for emerging markets.
Raised in Tanzania, Benjamin earned international scholarships that brought him to the United States for the first time at age 17. At 21, he became the youngest African in history to be admitted to Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he earned his MBA. He also completed Executive Education at Harvard Kennedy School, becoming the first Tanzanian to attend both institutions.
Before founding NALA, Fernandes was a national television personality in Tanzania and later worked in the United States at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where he was exposed to the structural challenges of financial access and cross-border money movement in developing economies.
Fernandes founded NALA to build modern payment rails for the next billion users. Under his leadership, NALA has evolved into a stablecoin-native payments platform, enabling faster, lower-cost, and more transparent cross-border transactions. NALA operates across Europe, the United States, the United Kingdom, and emerging markets, with a global team of nearly 150 employees.
A core component of NALA’s infrastructure is Rafiki, which serves as the licensed cross-border off-ramp for stablecoins. Rafiki enables compliant conversion of stablecoins into local currencies, allowing businesses and individuals to seamlessly move value from on-chain assets to real-world bank accounts and wallets across multiple jurisdictions.
NALA has raised over $100 million from leading global investors including Y Combinator, Accel, Acrew Capital, Amplo, and Bessemer Venture Partners. The company was named to the Forbes Fintech 50 in 2025 & 2026.
Benjamin has been widely recognized for his leadership at the intersection of technology, finance, and emerging markets. In 2020, he was named the 15th most influential Tanzanian. In 2022, he was listed in the inaugural ROW100 Most Influential Technology Leaders globally. In 2023, he was named among Africa’s Top 100 Changemakers. In 2024, Forbes featured him on its digital daily cover with a profile on his work building global payment infrastructure. In 2026, he was ranked 15th on the Top 200 Voices in Fintech & Crypto worldwide and named to Stablecoins Most Influential 2026 by Stablecon.
