Cashwise Finance has introduced Orbit, a new virtual dollar card product designed to let African businesses issue dedicated payment cards to individual teams, projects, and departments instead of relying on a single company card.
Solving The One-Card Problem
Orbit responds to a common operational bottleneck among African startups, agencies, and small businesses. Many companies still run all their international payments through one card, usually held by the founder or a senior executive. When a marketing team needs to fund a Google or Meta ad account, or an engineering team needs to renew an AWS or Hetzner subscription, someone has to track that person down for approval. Cashwise describes this as forcing founders to become a human ATM, with campaigns pausing and subscriptions lapsing while everyone waits for one person to become available.
Orbit is built to remove that dependency. The platform issues multiple virtual dollar cards to different teams or departments within a business, each with spending limits that the business owner sets and real-time visibility into how funds are used. Rather than a single card moving between hands or being shared over WhatsApp, each unit within a company gets its own card tied to its own budget.
Built For Global Tools And Ad Platforms
The card is positioned specifically around the recurring payment needs of digital-first businesses. Cashwise says Orbit works across platforms including Meta Ads, Google Ads, AWS, GCP, Hetzner, Adobe, Canva, Figma, Notion, Alibaba, Shopify, and Stripe, alongside other tools that businesses depend on to operate. That range matters for Nigerian and broader African businesses that routinely need dollar-denominated payments for infrastructure and advertising but face friction accessing them through conventional banking channels.
Instant issuance is central to the pitch. Cashwise frames Orbit as removing bank queues entirely, allowing businesses to generate new cards on demand rather than waiting for the approval cycles typical of traditional banking infrastructure.
Why Agencies Are An Early Focus
Digital marketing and advertising agencies appear to be an early target segment. One account shared by Cashwise describes agencies struggling to create multiple virtual cards for separate client ad accounts after Barter by Flutterwave, a widely used virtual card product, went offline. That gap left agency owners without a reliable way to isolate spending by client, complicating budget tracking and reconciliation.
Cashwise says the founder built Orbit after repeatedly observing staff members using personal fintech accounts to access dollar cards on behalf of their employers, with finance teams left to reconcile spending from informal records like WhatsApp screenshots. That pattern, common across African SMEs operating without dedicated corporate card infrastructure, is what Orbit is meant to formalise.
Early Access And Incentives
Cashwise opened a waitlist for Orbit ahead of a broader rollout, initially seeking 30 business and agency owners to test the product and provide feedback before wider availability. The company later said the first 50 businesses to join the waitlist would receive free card issuance and zero transaction fees for 60 days, an incentive aimed at agencies, startups, and operations teams managing multi-client or multi-department spending.
Businesses interested in early access can join the waitlist through Orbit’s website.
