Yellow Card Closes Retail App To Focus On Business Payments

Yellow Card is closing its mobile app for individual customers as the African fintech turns its attention fully to businesses. In a customer notice updated on October 9, the company says retail services will no longer be available, but stresses that Yellow Card itself is not shutting down. The distinction matters to anyone who still has money or digital assets in the app.

The notice does not give a clear final shutdown date. Instead, it explains how affected customers can request a refund and what will happen to their information. Yellow Card says customers should contact it through the address published on its official help page, provide proof of identity and specify either a matching bank or mobile money account or an external wallet address for the coin they hold. It says refunds will take three to five business days. Customers moving cryptocurrency should check the coin and network carefully; a transfer to the wrong network can be difficult or impossible to recover.

That is a substantial change for a brand many people first knew as a way to buy and sell crypto on a phone. Yellow Card says it is concentrating on institutional-grade stablecoin infrastructure, including treasury, payments and liquidity services for companies in emerging markets. It says individual retail customers will not be able to use its services after the app closes. The company has not said in the notice that every account is affected in the same way or given a country-by-country timetable, so users should rely on the official guidance for their own accounts rather than assume a date circulating online applies to them.

The move comes as Yellow Card builds a wider payments business for companies moving money across borders. Earlier this week it introduced Global Accounts, which it says lets businesses manage dollar, pound and euro accounts through banking partners while connecting to local payment rails and stablecoin liquidity. That product is aimed at companies dealing with suppliers, customers and balances in different markets, not at people opening a retail crypto app.

Yellow Card’s decision also illustrates how the African digital-asset market has matured. The earliest consumer pitch was simple access to crypto. The opportunity many providers now see is behind the scenes: helping businesses settle payments, manage foreign currencies and move liquidity between markets. Yellow Card has previously explored the regulatory path for crypto services in Nigeria; the newly announced retail exit shifts the immediate question from acquiring users to serving corporate clients under the rules of each market.

For users, the practical priority is straightforward. Check the balance in the app, read Yellow Card’s official closure notice and use the company’s published support channel for a refund request. The help page asks for identity documents, which makes it especially important to verify that a request really comes from Yellow Card before sending anything. Do not rely on unsolicited messages promising to speed up withdrawals or asking you to transfer funds first.

Yellow Card says account data will be retained only where legal, regulatory or contractual requirements demand it, then deleted or anonymised after the applicable retention period. For now, the company has laid out a business pivot and a refund process, but customers still need a clear account-level timeline for the app’s final closure.