Africa’s Payment Rails Are Being Rebuilt, and the Stakes Are High

For decades, moving money across African borders was an exercise in friction. A trader in Lagos settling an invoice with a supplier in Nairobi would typically route the transaction through a correspondent bank in London or New York, pay conversion fees on both ends, and wait days for confirmation. The absurdity was structural: two African countries conducting business in someone else’s currency, on someone else’s infrastructure.

That model is now under direct pressure. A combination of national payment modernisation, continental policy coordination, and private sector competition is reshaping how money flows across Africa, together with consequences that reach well beyond fintech.

The Numbers Behind the Shift

The scale of what is already happening is easy to understate. According to the AfricaNenda Foundation’s State of Inclusive Instant Payment Systems (SIIPS) 2025 report, released in partnership with the World Bank and UNECA, 36 instant payment systems are now live across 31 African countries. Together, they processed 64 billion transactions worth nearly $2 trillion in 2024. Five new systems have been launched within the past year alone.

A Mastercard-commissioned report by Genesis Analytics projects Africa’s digital payments economy will reach $1.5 trillion by 2030, driven by growing internet access and expanding financial inclusion. Internet penetration on the continent is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 20%, while financial inclusion expands at roughly 6% per year.

These are aggregate figures and should be read as directional rather than definitive. But the trend lines are consistent across multiple independent sources, which makes them meaningful.

Nigeria as a Case Study in Real-Time Infrastructure

Nigeria offers a useful window into how national payment systems can mature quickly, and where the limits still are. The Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System’s Instant Payment (NIP) infrastructure, launched in 2011, accounted for 82.1% of all cashless transactions in the country in 2023. By 2028, the share of real-time payments in total transaction volume is expected to rise from 27.7% to over 50%.

That foundation has enabled the next layer of private sector activity. Payment gateways like Paystack, neobanks like Kuda, and merchant-focused platforms like Moniepoint have all built on NIBSS infrastructure to offer faster settlement, embedded credit, and QR-based merchant payments. Nigeria’s Zone has gone further still and developing what is described as Africa’s first regulated blockchain payment network, licensed by the Central Bank of Nigeria, connecting banks and fintechs through a decentralised architecture.

The domestic story is relatively coherent. The cross-border story is messier.

The Cross-Border Problem, and the Infrastructure Being Built to Solve It

Intra-African trade as a proportion of total African trade has historically been low, partly because the payment infrastructure to support it simply did not exist at the right price or speed. Cross-border transactions between African countries were typically routed through SWIFT, mediated by reserve currencies, and subject to correspondent banking fees that made small-value trade economically unviable.

The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), launched by Afreximbank in collaboration with the African Union and the AfCFTA Secretariat, is the most ambitious attempt to change that. As of 2025, PAPSS has expanded to 19 countries, connecting over 150 commercial banks and 14 payment switches. Algeria’s central bank became the 18th country of presence in August 2025, bringing North Africa further into the network.

The system enables real-time settlement in local currencies, bypassing the need for an intermediate hard currency. Early data from participating corridors suggests cost savings of up to 27% for end users, and some banks have reported transaction volume growth of over 1,000% after integrating with the platform through digital channels.

In June 2025, the consortium added PAPSSCARD, described as the continent’s first pan-African card scheme extending the system’s reach into retail and point-of-sale payments.

Interoperability: Still the Hard Problem

Progress on infrastructure has not resolved the underlying challenge of fragmentation. Each country retains its own regulatory framework, payment switch, and liquidity dynamics. Integrating national systems with a continental layer like PAPSS requires significant technical investment and policy alignment that many smaller markets are still working through.

As a June 2025 IMF Departmental Paper on digital payment innovations in Sub-Saharan Africa noted, building an enabling environment requires attention to competition, interoperability, and security in equal measure, and not just the deployment of systems.

The foreign exchange dimension adds another layer of complexity. In markets with limited FX liquidity, even technically capable payment systems can stall at the settlement layer. A sender may initiate a cross-border transaction correctly, but if the recipient country’s payment network lacks access to sufficient local currency on the other side, the transaction fails or delays. This is particularly acute for airline revenues and other sectors with large trapped-capital exposures across African markets.

Regulation Is Becoming a Competitive Variable

Central banks are increasingly active participants in this transformation, not just passive regulators. Nigeria’s CBN licensing of Zone’s blockchain network is one example. Kenya’s real-time infrastructure through PesaLink, Ghana’s GhIPSS, and Egypt’s InstaPay are backed by the Central Bank, that reflect deliberate decisions to build national payment rails as public infrastructure.

The question for the next phase is whether these national systems can talk to each other at scale, and whether the regulatory environments will evolve fast enough to allow commercial actors to build on top of them.

Thirty-six countries with live instant payment systems is a meaningful foundation. But having a system and having a functioning, liquid, interoperable ecosystem are different things. The gap between the two is where most of the actual work now sits.