Payrit is a small fintech issuing Verve cards in Nigeria and six neighbouring countries, with almost no fee detail published

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

The Payrit card is not a bank account with a card attached. It is a payment card issued by a fintech company, Tree-House Nigeria LTD, which states on its own pages that it is “a financial technology company and is not a bank” and works “in partnership with licensed transmitters and banking partners”. You order a physical or virtual card in an iOS app, it runs on the Verve and Interswitch networks rather than Visa or Mastercard, and it spends from a balance held in naira or in USDC/USDT — two currencies on one piece of plastic.

That is the whole idea, and for its intended reader it is a genuinely useful one: a West African user who holds some dollars or stablecoins and wants to spend them at ordinary shops and ATMs without opening a foreign bank account, and who would otherwise be paying a branch or a remittance agent to convert. Against that, the practical picture is thin in exactly the places that matter. The card’s public pages give one price — ₦7,000 for the physical card — and leave the monthly fee, the conversion fee, the foreign-exchange fee, ATM charges, spending limits and top-up networks unstated. The card networks are regional. Apple Pay and Google Pay support is not disclosed. No Trustpilot page was found, and, read literally, no complaints either.

So: a card worth knowing about, priced and documented in a way that forces you to ask questions before you commit rather than after. Below I go through who gets one, how to order it, what it costs, how you fund it, how it behaves day to day, and what can go wrong — and then the alternatives, for anyone who finds the missing details too thin to bank on.

*Conditions described here are current as of October 28, 2026.*

Verdict: 4.7 out of 10

Payrit scores 4.7 / 10 overall. That is not a verdict on the idea — the idea is sound, and for someone spending between naira and stablecoins across West Africa it is a specific problem solved competently. It is a verdict on how little is published about the terms you would be accepting, and on how young and narrow the setup is.

Let me show you how the score is built, criterion by criterion, so you can disagree with any single mark without throwing away the rest.

The column that sinks the score is the first one. Seven countries is a real market, and within them this could be the most useful card a person has. But a reader anywhere else — and many readers will be somewhere else, because a crypto card search rarely starts from inside the country that issues it — gets nothing. That is why “who can get it” scores 2 while “cost” scores 6. There is a genuine service here, and it is not a global one.

Who it suits, concretely: someone in Nigeria or one of the six neighbouring countries who has naira and wants USDC or USDT on the same card, or the reverse; who shops at physical terminals and uses ATMs rather than living entirely online; who is comfortable with an app-only company whose help centre is still under construction; and who is willing to treat the ₦7,000 as a first step and confirm the running costs in the app before scaling up.

Who it does not suit: anyone outside the seven countries; anyone whose income or spending is denominated in a currency the card clearly does not handle well, since the FX and conversion charges are unstated; anyone who depends on Apple Pay or Google Pay; anyone for whom a frozen balance with no published complaint procedure is a worse prospect than a card from a bank they already hold an account with; and anyone who needs card dispute handling documented, because none is published.

Will they give you the card?

The card works in Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, Togo.

That sentence is the entire published eligibility information. There is no stated rule about citizenship versus residence, no minimum age, no income requirement, no list of excluded countries within those seven, and no statement of whether a non-resident with a local address qualifies.

It is worth being clear about what that leaves you: nothing about identity verification. The card’s public pages do not state what KYC or identity checks are performed, what documents are needed, or whether verification tiers exist and what limits attach to them. That is different from saying there are no checks — regulated businesses in most markets are legally obliged to identify their customers, and a fintech working with licensed transmitters will almost certainly collect something. It simply means the card does not publish the standard, so you cannot compare it, and you will find out at onboarding rather than beforehand.

The wider point about identity checks is worth holding onto, because it applies far beyond this card. Anti-money-laundering law requires regulated businesses to verify customers and assess risk, including ongoing transaction monitoring and reporting of suspicious activity. In the EU, customer due diligence normally covers name, address, date of birth, nationality and identity documentation, a sanctions check, the purpose of the relationship, and whether the customer is a politically exposed person. In the US, the customer identification programme requires name, date of birth, address and an identification number, with electronic systems also validating proof-of-address documents against records. Nationality is recorded and screened separately from residence, because sanctions screening and issuer risk policy are often applied to citizenship and country of birth as well as country of address. If due diligence cannot be completed, EU rules require the institution to hold off on the relationship — which is why accounts get closed or frozen pending documents, and it can happen to a legitimate customer with nothing wrong.

Two practical consequences for you. First, expect to prove who you are before the card is useful, even though Payrit does not advertise the process. Second, there is no version of this that works by avoiding those checks. Anyone offering to get you a card without them is not offering a compliant card, and that is not a shortcut worth taking.

How to get it

Order in the app. You provide a card name, a delivery address and a primary balance, and the card is produced immediately and shipped. Delivery is quoted as “5–14 working days within Lagos and most states in Nigeria”. You activate it with the first 6 and last 4 digits and set a new PIN.

The form the card takes is a physical card or a virtual card, on the Verve and Interswitch networks. It spends naira and USDC/USDT from one card.

Let me separate what this means practically, because two of these facts change the shape of the whole product and the third is a footnote most readers will skip.

The networks matter most. Verve and Interswitch are African schemes, not Visa and Mastercard. If you have spent time with international cards, you will meet a difference: acceptance outside West Africa and outside online contexts is narrower than you are used to, and some merchants treat unfamiliar card types more cautiously. This is not Payrit’s fault and not unusual — but it is the single biggest adjustment for a cardholder who has previously held a global brand.

The two-balance design matters second. Naming a “primary balance” at order time suggests you choose which wallet the card draws on by default, and that you can hold naira and USDC/USDT side by side. The card’s own words on this are worth reading twice: “Your card works without needing to be prefunded” — it draws on the connected primary balance rather than requiring a top-up before each purchase. That is convenient. It also means the card is spending live funds the instant an authorisation lands, which is exactly why the freeze button described later matters.

The delivery line is the footnote, and it is quietly consequential. Five to fourteen working days, inside Lagos and most Nigerian states. If you are outside Nigeria, or outside those states, the card’s pages do not say what happens — cost of delivery not stated, international delivery not stated. Add a virtual card to that and you have a working fallback for the waiting period, if virtual is available in your country; the card is available in both forms, so that part is at least on the menu.

The app itself is the iOS app “Payrit” by TREE-HOUSE NIGERIA LIMITED, version dated 2026-09-18 when I looked, rated 4.33 from 3 ratings. Three ratings is not a signal in either direction. It does tell you how young the public footprint is.

Fees: what it really costs

This is the weakest part of the picture, so I will give you everything the card publishes and be explicit about the gaps.

The one number on the price list is: “The Payrit Card costs ₦7,000” — that is the physical card. The monthly fee is not stated. The conversion fee is not stated. Any foreign-exchange fee is not stated. ATM fees and allowances are not stated. Daily and monthly spending limits are not stated. There are no tiers of any kind published — no free tier, no premium tier, nothing to compare against. Where the card operates at POS terminals and ATMs in Africa, no charges are stated for that.

Let me put it in a table so the shape of the gap is obvious rather than buried in prose.

The currency row is the one with content: naira and USDC/USDT on one card is the product’s reason to exist, and it is genuinely unusual to see a card that mixes a national currency and a dollar stablecoin without forcing a conversion at a fixed, published rate.

Now the three everyday payments I would want to see priced before recommending this to anyone. These are worked through as illustrations of where a fee can hide, not as statements of what Payrit charges — the card does not publish the numbers.

A typical grocery shop purchase paid from your naira balance. The cleanest case, and the one most likely to cost you nothing beyond the payment itself: same currency, no conversion. The only fee in this path that is even a candidate is a POS or scheme charge, and nothing is published about it. This is the payment to test first, because if it is clean, you have established your baseline.

A $20 online subscription paid from your USDC balance, with your primary balance in naira. Here you are in the gap. If the card converts naira to dollars, or your USDC to naira, or does neither and routes the charge through a scheme, the rate and any conversion or FX fee apply — and none of them is on the card’s pages. You are also dependent on a decline if the merchant does not accept your card type. So the second payment is the one to price before you rely on the card.

A ₦10,000 cash withdrawal at an ATM. A cash withdrawal stacks everything: any scheme or ATM fee, possibly an FX component if the cash is in a currency other than your balance, and your limit — daily and monthly limits are unstated, so you do not know in advance whether the ₦10,000 will be approved. For a card whose value proposition is spending naira locally, ATM access is important, and it is the least documented part of the offer.

One cost that is not the card provider’s: on-chain network fees for a crypto deposit — gas, or bandwidth on networks that price that way — are charged by the blockchain, not by Payrit. That money leaves regardless of what the card does with it, so when you compare costs across crypto cards, it belongs in your arithmetic on the funding side, not the spending side.

Top up: funding the balance

Fund the account with any supported currency — USDC, USDT or naira — and spend right away. The card’s line is the useful one: “Your card works without needing to be prefunded”, because it draws on the connected primary balance.

That is the whole funding story as published, and it has two parts. Naira and USDC/USDT wallets spend from one card, which is simple in the way that matters. Which networks to send on is not stated — and that is not a detail, it is the difference between a working deposit and a lost one.

Here is why. Blockchain transfers are typically irreversible. A deposit sent on a network the card provider does not support, or sent to an address belonging to a different network, can be lost outright or need manual support recovery with no guarantee of success. If you hold USDT, the network you send it on matters in a second way too: USDT has been issued on networks including Ethereum, Tron, Solana, Polygon, Avalanche and others, and fees differ sharply between them — Ethereum charges gas in ETH, so a wallet holding USDT with no ETH cannot send at all. If you hold USDC, check before you assume: USDC is natively supported on 38 networks, but Circle stopped supporting USDC on Tron in February 2024, so USDC over TRC20 is not a native option. Tether also states that it disables tokens in wallets on the OFAC sanctions list and has frozen funds tied to illicit activity, so stablecoins are not censorship-proof and compliance screening is a real feature of the asset, not a rounding error.

So the honest position on funding: you can fund in three currencies, and you must ask the app or the company which network to use for the crypto ones, because getting it wrong is expensive and the card does not put it on the page. Fees for funding are not stated either.

Withdrawal is also not stated. If you read “how do I withdraw money from Payrit” as “can I get my naira out to a bank account”, there is no published answer. That is a different question from “can I get cash at an ATM”, and both are worth asking.

One reassurance that does hold: the card cannot overdraw in the classic sense. In a pre-loaded balance model, you convert or top up a balance and the card spends only that balance, so there is no negative balance building up behind your back. Whatever else is undocumented, that structural protection is real.

Paying with it every day

Day to day, Payrit is a physical and virtual card on Verve and Interswitch, accepted at POS terminals and ATMs in Africa, spending naira and USDC/USDT from a single card.

That is the honest summary, and it is thinner than most card reviews in this category because several things that are usually standard are simply not addressed. Wallets: not stated — that is, whether the card holds or exposes any crypto balance of its own beyond the funding wallets is not described. Rewards: not stated — no cashback, no points, no referral. Apple Pay and Google Pay: not stated, which for a physical card in 2026 is the most consequential silence in this section, because most card spend in many markets now happens through a phone wallet rather than a plastic stripe.

So what actually happens when you tap? The card draws on the connected primary balance — naira or USDC/USDT — and the transaction is settled through the Verve and Interswitch rails. If the balance is in a currency the merchant is billing in something other than, you are exposed to whatever conversion and FX treatment applies, and neither is published. That is the recurring theme of this review, and it is why “cost” scores 6 and not higher.

Some practical context for everyday use that is not about this card’s terms but about what you will run into. A declined authorisation may leave a hold on your funds that stays for several days — typically up to 7 — so a failed payment can quietly tie up money you meant to spend. Some merchants decline prepaid or foreign-issued cards, and the mechanism is worth knowing: a card number starts with a 6- or 8-digit issuer identification number that any merchant can look up to see which institution and which country issued the card, and a mismatch between issuer country and billing address can trigger extra scrutiny. This is why a card issued in one country can look foreign to a shop in another — and it is a general caution, not a claim about Payrit’s acceptance. Address Verification Service, which compares the numeric parts of the billing address a buyer typed against issuer records, is mainly offered in the US, Canada and the UK and is generally unavailable for foreign-issued cards, which can cause declines; that is another reason online purchases on a regionally issued card can behave differently from domestic ones.

What you do have is a real convenience: one card for two very different balances. A user with naira earnings and some USDT does not have to think about which wallet today; the card draws on the primary balance and, when that is spent, presumably the other stands behind it — though the exact fallback behaviour is not stated either, so ask.

What can go wrong

The risk picture here is mostly about what is unknown, and one company fact that is worth reading carefully.

The company. “Payrit is a product of Tree-House Nigeria LTD”; it describes itself as “a financial technology company and is not a bank”, and says its services run “in partnership with licensed transmitters and banking partners”. The issuer is not named. Read that sentence again: not a bank, services delivered through licensed partners, no named issuer. That is a normal and legal structure — many cards are issued by a licensed institution while a fintech owns the app and the customer relationship — but it means the entity whose name appears on your card, and the regulator you would deal with in a dispute, are not the brand you signed up with. Anyone asking “is Payrit a bank” deserves that nuance: no, and its partners are the licensed parties.

Complaints. No official incidents or user reports found, and no Trustpilot page. Read that carefully too: absence of complaints on a card this young, with an App Store rating resting on 3 ratings, is not evidence of a clean record. It is evidence of a small footprint. Do not treat silence as endorsement.

What you can actually control. Freeze and unfreeze the card instantly in the app; a lost card can be terminated and a new one requested; the PIN is set at activation. Those are real and useful — the instant freeze is the one that matters most on a card that draws on a live balance. But disputes are not stated. If a charge goes wrong, no published procedure tells you who you call, in what timeframe, or with what evidence. Compare that with the general protections you might otherwise assume: US debit card reversal rights come from Regulation E and credit card rights from Regulation Z, prepaid-card coverage varies and should not be assumed, and a chargeback is a refund ordered by the card issuer with reason codes such as fraud, duplicate billing or goods not received. Under 3-D Secure, liability for fraudulent online payments can shift from merchant to your bank — but that shift depends on the authentication having happened, and none of that is described for this card.

Support. “Speak with the founders directly” and a community link on the card page; the help centre is marked “Under construction”; hours and languages are not stated. I will be straight with you about what that means: talking to the founders is a genuine advantage of small fintechs, and it is not a substitute for a documented dispute process. If something goes wrong at 11pm on a Saturday, hours are not stated, so you do not know whether anyone is there.

The category risk, which is not this card’s fault but applies to it. A crypto card depends on two things at once: a payment licence and a crypto licence. Visa and Mastercard themselves do not issue crypto cards to consumers — they license issuers and can suspend a programme. In November 2022 Visa said it had “terminated our global agreements with FTX” and the FTX US debit card programme was being wound down by its issuer. WaveCrest, a Visa issuer that supplied crypto card brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018, closing all WaveCrest-issued Visa programmes. Programme closures typically give notice, then stop spending and loading, then ask users to withdraw remaining balances. Separately, custodial platforms have a record of failures: Mt. Gox (about US$350 million reported stolen 2011-2014), Coincheck (about US$400 million, 2018), Ronin Network (US$625 million, 2022). Holding funds with a custodian carries counterparty and hack risk; a seed phrase of 12 to 24 words is an unencrypted form of the private key, and anyone who obtains it can restore the wallet and spend it.

I am not predicting any of that for Payrit. I am telling you the category you are buying into, because the card’s own page says “not a bank” and gives you no issuer name, and those two facts together mean you should know what the baseline risk is before you load it.

There is one point in the company’s favour on the record: the app’s version notes show steady work. v3.0.96 (“Feb 5”) — “Physical cards are now available”; v3.0.114 (“Apr 5”) — “Payrit virtual dollar and crypto card now available”. The year is not shown on the page. A team shipping features through April is a better signal than an app that stopped updating.

What to take instead

If Payrit’s missing fee sheet is the problem, the alternatives below do publish more. They are not all better fits for a West African spender — two of them are aimed at entirely different customers — but they answer the same question with more transparency.

International Visa Card is the one with the clearest terms and the longest exclusion list. Account or card is not available to residents or legal registrants of Belarus, mainland China, North Korea, Cuba, India, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, Russia, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, Venezuela, Vietnam, and FATF grey-list countries are reviewed case by case with compliance approval. Purchases are blocked in North Korea, Cuba, Iran, Russia, Syria, Ukraine, Venezuela. Note that the rule is by residence or registration — citizenship is not mentioned, which is a different and often looser test than Payrit’s geographic footprint. On the plus side, deposits of USDC or USDT go into the USD account free at 1:1, and there are also USD, EUR, SEPA, SWIFT and FedNow deposits. Against it: a $5 issuance fee, $9 or $19 a month on the paid plans, and a 2% FX fee on top of the Visa exchange rate for anything not in USD — which is expensive enough that it is only sensible if you mostly spend in dollars.

UNi Card has the most reassuring fee language of the three: no annual fee, no foreign transaction fee, no hidden exchange fees, assets converted at live OTC rates. It sits on Mastercard, which is broader internationally than Verve or Interswitch. Rewards are “Spend-to-Earn” up to 3%. What it does not tell you is who can get it, what it costs to issue, or how you fund it — three gaps roughly the same size as Payrit’s, but in different places.

Whop Cards is the least documented of the three and the most geographically specific: consumers in 31 US states, businesses in 41. Unsupported consumer countries include Belarus, China (Mainland), Cuba, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, North Korea, Russia, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, Venezuela and Vietnam. The reward is the draw: 5% cashback at select merchants, currently Uber, more planned, with payout currency and conditions not stated. It spends from a Whop balance and is backed by stablecoin collateral from a linked wallet, but the coins and networks are not stated.

One thing all three share, which is worth noticing as a pattern rather than a coincidence: each discloses its restricted countries more clearly than its fees, and none publishes a Trustpilot-style complaint history. That is the normal state of this category. My advice is the unglamorous one — before you commit to any of them, work out what one typical payment of yours will cost in total, including the funding-side network fee, and get that number in writing.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend Payrit to someone specific, and I would tell that person exactly what to do first.

Recommend it to if: you are in Nigeria, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Mali, Senegal or Togo; you hold or expect to hold both naira and USDC or USDT; you spend at physical terminals and use ATMs rather than only online; you want a card without opening a foreign bank account; and you are comfortable that the company is a young fintech, not a bank, whose help centre is still being built.

Do not recommend it to if: you live outside those seven countries; Apple Pay or Google Pay is how you actually pay; you need a published dispute procedure before you trust a balance; or you intend to hold a large sum on it.

My advice to the person I would recommend it to is short. Start with the virtual card if one is available to you, and use it for one ordinary purchase to see the conversion behaviour for yourself. Fund a small amount, and before you send any crypto, ask which network to use — that is the one question where a wrong answer cannot be undone. Set the PIN, and find the freeze button before you need it, not after. Then ask the company, in writing, for the monthly fee, the conversion fee, any FX fee, the ATM charges and your daily and monthly limits; a company that answers those five questions plainly has earned more of your money than one that does not. If they answer, Payrit is a reasonable card for its market. If they do not, you have your answer too.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Payrit card?

The Payrit card is a payment card issued by Tree-House Nigeria LTD, a fintech that states it is not a bank and works with licensed partners. It comes as a physical or virtual card on the Verve and Interswitch networks, and it spends from a single balance that can be held in naira or in USDC/USDT. The point is to use naira and stablecoin funds at ordinary shops and ATMs in West Africa without opening a foreign bank account.

Is Payrit a bank?

No. Payrit describes itself as “a financial technology company and is not a bank”, and says its services are delivered “in partnership with licensed transmitters and banking partners”. The issuer of the card is not named on the public pages. That structure is legal and common, but it means the licensed institution, not the Payrit brand, is the counterparty you would deal with in a dispute.

How much does the Payrit card cost?

The one published price is ₦7,000 for the physical card. The monthly fee is not stated, and neither are the conversion fee, any foreign-exchange fee, ATM charges, or daily and monthly spending limits. There are also no published tiers. Because the running costs are unstated, treat ₦7,000 as the known entry cost rather than the total price of using the card.

How do I top up the Payrit card?

You fund the account with any supported currency — USDC, USDT or naira — and can spend right away; the card draws on the connected primary balance and does not need prefunding before each purchase. Which network to send crypto on is not stated, and this matters more than it looks: blockchain transfers are typically irreversible, so a deposit on an unsupported network or to a wrong-network address can be lost.

How do I activate the Payrit card?

You order in the app with a card name, delivery address and primary balance; the card is produced immediately and shipped, quoted at “5–14 working days within Lagos and most states in Nigeria”. Activation uses the first 6 and last 4 digits of the card plus a new PIN you set at the same time. The cost of delivery is not stated, and neither is delivery outside Nigeria.

Where can I use the Payrit card?

At POS terminals and ATMs in Africa, within the seven countries the card works in: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal and Togo. Because it runs on Verve and Interswitch rather than Visa or Mastercard, acceptance outside that region is narrower than an international brand, and some merchants treat unfamiliar or foreign-issued card types more cautiously.

Does Payrit require KYC?

The card’s public pages do not state what identity checks are performed, which documents are needed, or whether verification tiers exist. That is not the same as saying there are no checks — anti-money-laundering rules generally require regulated businesses to verify customers — but it means you will find the process out at onboarding rather than in advance.

Can I add the Payrit card to Apple Wallet or Google Pay?

Apple Pay and Google Pay support is not stated on the card’s pages. This is the most consequential gap for everyday use, because much card spending now happens through a phone wallet rather than the physical card. If you pay by phone rather than by plastic, that is a question to put to the company directly before you order.

Is the Payrit card safe?

There are real protections: you can freeze and unfreeze the card instantly in the app, terminate a lost card and request a new one, and set a PIN at activation. Against that, the card is not from a bank, its issuer is unnamed, its help centre is marked “Under construction” with no stated hours, and no dispute procedure is published. No official incidents or user reports were found, but on an app rated from three ratings, that is a small footprint rather than a clean record.

Is a Payrit card worth it?

For someone in Nigeria or a neighbouring country holding both naira and USDC/USDT and spending at physical terminals, the two-currency single card is a genuine convenience that international cards do not offer easily. Against that, one published price, no fee schedule, no disclosed limits, no phone-wallet support, and regional networks. My test: fund a small amount, try one real payment, and get the monthly, conversion, FX, ATM and limit figures in writing before you scale up.

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