Nigeria’s car market is estimated at roughly 1.15 million new and used vehicles, and because local production meets only a fraction of that, the country leans heavily on imports to fill the gap. Most of those imports are used cars, and the single largest source of them is the United States. How smoothly that trade runs has a lot to do with money. The US Department of Commerce notes that American used-car exports to Nigeria fell from more than a billion dollars in 2021 to about $562 million in 2023, a slide it ties directly to foreign exchange scarcity and the rising cost of clearing vehicles. The pattern showed up again in Nigeria’s own trade data, passenger car imports dipped in 2024 as the naira weakened, then rebounded to N1.58 trillion in 2025, the highest in three years, once foreign exchange became easier to access.
The same trade powers Ghana, where used cars account for about 90 percent of a market that brings in roughly 100,000 vehicles a year, with the US again among the top suppliers. Between them, Nigeria and Ghana form one of the busiest used-car corridors connecting the US and Africa, a trade built on a growing middle class, a wide gap between local supply and demand, and years of hard-earned experience buying through US auctions.
Sitting at the center of that corridor, for over two decades, has been Boacon Autos.
The Ohio-based company is IAA’s official Broker and Market Alliance for Nigeria and Ghana, operating physical IAA Auction Centers in Lagos and Accra, a designation IAA grants to a small number of trusted partners worldwide. Boacon guides African buyers through the import process, covering every operational detail between winning a bid in the US and receiving a vehicle on African soil. Its client base spans individual buyers and large-scale import businesses across the region, and its reputation in this trade has been built on deep knowledge of the US auction market and the ability to get vehicles where they need to go.
Boacon has now partnered with Clea, a licensed cross-border payment company, to bring the same level of structure and reliability to how their customers pay for everything in that process.
Clea operates a payment infrastructure specifically built for African importers sending money into the United States. The platform enables users to send compliant payments to their supplier, and has been processing payments across the US-Africa trade corridor with full transaction visibility from initiation to settlement. For Boacon’s customers, this means a compliant, transparent way to pay IAA for purchased vehicles, settle freight and shipping charges, and cover every other dollar obligation that comes with a full import cycle, without the delays, transfer limits, and exchange rate losses that have made dollar payments from West Africa a recurring headache for importers.
The practical effect is that Boacon’s customers now have a complete, connected path from finding a vehicle on IAA to bidding on it, buying it, paying for it, and receiving it at their destination port. Each part of that chain has always existed. What this partnership does is close the gap between the operational side of the trade, which Boacon has refined over 20 years, and the financial side, which now runs on infrastructure built to handle exactly this kind of transaction.
The partnership also says something about how the West African vehicle import market has changed over the years. What used to operate through loose associations and manual processes has grown into a deeply connected trade corridor linking US auctions, exporters, shipping companies, brokers, and buyers across the region.
As the market has grown, so have the expectations around it. Importers are not only looking for access to vehicles anymore. They want processes that are clearer, faster, and easier to manage from start to finish. Payment has long been the part of that process that lagged, and it is the part this partnership is built to fix.
