Why Cadana Chose Post-Payment Operations Over Payment Processing: A Category Selection Masterclass

Why Cadana Chose Post-Payment Operations Over Payment Processing: A Category Selection Masterclass

The payments infrastructure market had dozens of well-funded competitors, established players, and new startups launching every month. Albert Owusu-Asare, CEO and Co-Founder of Cadana, could have joined the fight for market share. Instead, he found a $400 million opportunity hiding in plain sight: the operational chaos that happens after payments clear. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Albert shared how Cadana discovered this adjacent category and the framework any founder can use to identify defensible positioning when the obvious market is too crowded.

The Obvious Play: Payment Processing Infrastructure

After Cadana’s first product failed to find market fit, the team pivoted into payments infrastructure. The logic seemed solid: businesses in Africa struggled with payment acceptance, and improving acceptance rates would directly increase revenue for customers.

“We went into the payments infrastructure space because we realized that, okay, a lot of people have problems accepting payments. If we can help them accept more payments, then we solve the problem,” Albert explains. They built technology that worked, improved acceptance rates, and addressed a real problem.

But when they took the product to market, something unexpected happened. Customers acknowledged the problem but wouldn’t switch. “People weren’t actually losing that much money from payments not being accepted. So it wasn’t actually a big enough pain point for them to want to switch.”

This is where most founders double down on the obvious market. They improve the product, refine the positioning, or invest more in sales and marketing. Albert made a different choice: he questioned whether he was solving the right problem in the first place.

The Discovery: Following the Money Trail

Rather than pushing harder on payment acceptance, Albert went back to fundamentals: customer conversations without an agenda. Not pitching, not demoing—just listening to where businesses were actually bleeding money.

“We started speaking to a lot more people and realized that actually the biggest problem that people had was not even accepting the payment. The biggest problem people had was everything that happens after you accept the payment,” Albert reveals.

This insight changed everything. Businesses weren’t losing significant money on failed payment acceptance—the real losses came from operational complexity once payments cleared. Reconciliation consumed entire finance teams, accounting integrations required constant manual work, multi-currency operations created endless errors, and compliance reporting turned into full-time jobs.

“That’s where businesses were actually losing the most money, and that’s where they actually needed the most help,” Albert says. The expensive problem wasn’t in the crowded payment processing category—it was in the adjacent, overlooked category of post-payment operations.

The Framework: How to Identify Adjacent Category Opportunities

Albert’s discovery wasn’t luck—it revealed a replicable framework for finding defensible adjacent categories when the obvious market is too competitive.

First, map the entire value chain, not just the obvious problem. Payment processing is one step in a complex workflow. Albert’s mistake wasn’t building payment infrastructure—it was stopping his analysis at payment acceptance without mapping what happened before and after.

The framework: Don’t just understand your initial target problem. Map the entire workflow that includes your problem. Where does money flow? Where does information get lost? Where do manual processes create bottlenecks? The defensible adjacent category often hides in the steps immediately before or after the obvious problem.

Second, follow the actual dollar losses, not the acknowledged problems. Customers acknowledged payment acceptance as a problem, but when Albert asked them to quantify losses, the numbers were small. Post-payment operations, by contrast, had clear, large dollar impacts.

The test: Ask potential customers to quantify the financial impact of each problem in their workflow. Not “Is this a problem?” but “How much money are you losing?” The adjacent category worth entering is where customers can immediately cite specific dollar amounts.

Third, look for operational problems, not feature gaps. Payment processing was a feature problem—can we increase acceptance rates? Post-payment operations was an operational problem—can we eliminate entire processes that consume teams?

The distinction matters because operational problems create stickier, more defensible businesses. Features get commoditized and competed away. Operations become embedded in how customers work, creating much higher switching costs.

The Competitive Positioning Advantage

By choosing post-payment operations over payment processing, Cadana gained multiple positioning advantages that wouldn’t have existed in the crowded payment processing market.

First, they avoided direct competition with well-funded payment processors. Companies building payment gateways compete on acceptance rates, fees, and geographic coverage—attributes that require massive scale and capital to win. Cadana could build post-payment infrastructure without needing to outspend payment processors.

Second, they became complementary rather than competitive to existing infrastructure. Payment processors need post-payment operations tools to complete the solution for customers. This meant Cadana could potentially partner with competitors in the payment processing space rather than fighting them.

Third, they owned a problem with clear ROI. The dollar losses from poor post-payment operations—time spent on reconciliation, errors in accounting, compliance failures—were easy to quantify and significant enough to justify switching costs. Payment acceptance improvements, by contrast, had murkier ROI.

Fourth, they created network effects that payment processors couldn’t replicate. The more integrations Cadana built with accounting systems, banks, and payment processors, the more valuable the platform became. These integrations became moats that adjacent competitors in payment processing couldn’t easily cross.

The Product Implications: Building for Operations, Not Transactions

Choosing post-payment operations over payment processing required building a fundamentally different type of product. Payment processing is about transaction throughput, uptime, and acceptance rates. Post-payment operations is about workflow automation, data accuracy, and operational efficiency.

“We basically built the entire product again, version three, to focus on that operations piece,” Albert explains. This wasn’t a feature pivot—it was a complete reconception of what problem Cadana solved and how the product worked.

The platform handled reconciliation across multiple payment sources, integrated with accounting systems, managed multi-currency complexity, automated compliance reporting, and orchestrated the dozens of operational steps that happen after payment acceptance. This infrastructure problem required different technical decisions than transaction processing.

“We focus very much on scalability and reliability,” Albert emphasizes. Building for operations meant handling messy, real-world data from dozens of sources and making sense of it automatically. It meant building for businesses that process thousands of transactions daily and need those transactions reconciled, categorized, and reported without manual intervention.

The Market Size Validation: From Theory to $400M

The proof that Albert identified the right adjacent category came not from market research but from actual customer adoption. “We currently work with over 400 businesses across 26 African countries,” Albert shares. The platform now processes over $400 million in transaction volume annually.

This growth validated that post-payment operations was a genuine category, not just a feature adjacent to payment processing. Customers weren’t buying reconciliation as an add-on to payment processing—they were buying comprehensive operational infrastructure that happened to integrate with payment processors.

The category selection also enabled Cadana’s horizontal expansion across industries. “Because we built a very horizontal platform, we work with all kinds of businesses,” Albert explains. “We work with ride hailing companies, we work with e-commerce companies, we work with fintech companies, betting companies, software companies.”

Payment processing tools tend to be vertical-specific because acceptance rates and payment methods vary by industry. Post-payment operations, by contrast, looks similar across industries—every business needs reconciliation, accounting integration, and compliance reporting regardless of what they sell.

The Replicable Pattern for Adjacent Category Selection

Albert’s journey from payment processing to post-payment operations reveals a pattern any founder can apply when the obvious market is too crowded.

Start with customer conversations that map entire workflows, not just the problem your initial product solves. Ask customers to walk through their complete process from beginning to end, and listen for where they’re actually losing money.

Quantify the financial impact of each step in the workflow. Which problems cost customers the most in dollars, time, or opportunity? The adjacent category worth entering is usually where the losses are largest, even if the problem seems less obvious.

Look for operational problems rather than feature improvements. Operations create defensible businesses with high switching costs. Features get competed away.

Evaluate competitive dynamics in each adjacent category. Sometimes the best opportunity is the one where you’re not fighting well-funded, established players. Being complementary to competitors is often better than competing directly.

Build for the entire operational problem, not just one piece of it. Cadana’s success came from solving the complete post-payment workflow, not just reconciliation or just accounting integration. Comprehensive solutions to operational problems create more value and higher switching costs than point solutions.

Albert’s framework proves that when the obvious market is crowded, the answer isn’t better execution in that market—it’s finding the adjacent category where you can build something defensible.