Nicholas Allen

Co-Founder and CEO at Arrel

Nicholas Allen is Co-Founder and CEO of Arrel Technology, an Africa-first fintech where he leads the development of institutional infrastructure for digital assets, payments, and market connectivity. An electronic engineer (BSc summa cum laude, MSc) by training, Nicholas has spent over 20 years working at the intersection of engineering, financial systems, and emerging technology. Before entering digital assets, he spent over a decade in electronic research, design, and manufacturing, leading a 30-plus person multidisciplinary team across product development, solutions architecture, and R&D, with exposure to Big Data, Telematics, and IoT through work across the UK, Europe, the US, Russia, and Asia. Since 2017, Nicholas has focused on bridging traditional finance and the digital asset ecosystem, building and scaling a digital asset platform that processed over $3.5 billion in volume and earned multiple DaVinci Technology Top 100 awards. Under his leadership, Arrel, an ISO 27001 certified and SOC 2 Type II attested member of the Circle Alliance and the United African Blockchain Association, has built infrastructure spanning MPC custody, multi-venue execution, stablecoin payments, and compliance, giving banks, fintechs, and financial institutions a unified, non-custodial API across multiple counterparties and 15+ blockchains. Built on the continent for the continent, Arrel is designed around the realities African institutions face, from exchange controls and fragmented payment rails to the cost of compliance, connecting them to the local exchanges, stablecoin rails, and licensed providers they need. Arrel has established relationships with both Circle and Stellar, having been awarded a Circle Ecosystem Grant and a Stellar Community Fund Build Award, and is a finalist in the Digital Assets / Cryptocurrency Innovation category at the SA FinTech Awards 2026. A regular voice on stablecoin and digital asset infrastructure, he has recently presented at Sybrin’s Payments in Motion in Accra and on Stellar’s Demo Day, joined the closing plenary on stablecoins, CBDCs and the future of digital money at FinTech Summit Africa 2026, and moderated a panel on stablecoins as financial infrastructure at CryptoFest Cape Town. He is a member of the IEEE and SAIEE.

  • https://arreltech.com/
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