Picture Africa’s payments like a pan-African road trip. Some highways are smooth, freshly paved, and toll-free. Others are bumpy dirt roads with goats stubbornly blocking your way. Now imagine trying to drive a truckload of goods across 10 borders. That’s pretty much what cross-border payments in Africa feel like today.
The big question: which modern payment rails are actually helping African businesses move money across borders faster, cheaper, and with fewer breakdowns? Let’s hit the road.
Mobile Money: The Local Hero Trying to Go Global
Mobile money is Africa’s OG payment disruptor. From M-Pesa in Kenya to MTN MoMo in Ghana, it’s how millions of people transact daily. But when it comes to cross-border payments, mobile money is still like a boda-boda taxi: nimble, affordable, but not yet built for highways.
Strengths:
Ubiquity: Over 60% of the world’s mobile money accounts live in Africa.
Accessibility: Serves the unbanked better than any card scheme ever could.
Adoption: Deeply entrenched in daily life. Think airtime, school fees, groceries.
Challenges:
Fragmentation: Each mobile money operator is its own island. Moving funds from Safaricom to MTN? Good luck.
Limited scale: Works beautifully domestically but cross-border corridors are patchy.
Interoperability woes: Too many middlemen make transfers slow and costly.
Verdict: Mobile money is the neighborhood MVP but needs serious infrastructure upgrades (and better partnerships) to become a continental star.
PAPSS: The Pan-African Dream
The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) is the cool new kid on the block. Backed by Afreximbank and designed to support the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), PAPSS promises to let businesses pay across borders in local currencies without detouring through New York or London.
Why it matters:
Currency savings: Businesses avoid USD conversion costs.
Policy support: It’s championed by central banks and policymakers.
Trade enabler: Imagine Kenyan coffee exporters getting paid by Nigerian buyers in shillings, instantly.
The catch:
Adoption is slow: Only a handful of countries and banks are live.
Trust gap: Businesses still default to “old reliable” USD for big deals.
Awareness: Most SMEs don’t even know PAPSS exists (yet).
Verdict: PAPSS is the closest thing Africa has to a payments autobahn but only a small section is open. Until more countries sign up, it’s promise > practice.
Card Networks: The Old Guard With a Global Pass
Visa, Mastercard, and Verve (Nigeria’s local champion) have long been Africa’s payment passports. They connect African businesses to global markets whether that’s a Ugandan SaaS startup selling to the U.S. or a Ghanaian tourist booking a Paris hotel.
Strengths:
Global reach: Cards work almost anywhere.
Trust factor: Centuries of credibility (okay, decades).
E-commerce enabler: Still the backbone of online transactions.
Challenges:
High fees: Cross-border card transactions are expensive.
Low penetration: Only about 3% of Africans have a credit card.
Infrastructure gaps: Many African merchants still don’t accept cards.
Verdict: Cards are essential for global trade, but their dominance is waning. In Africa’s digital-first, mobile-led reality, they’re slowly becoming luxury highways rather than everyday roads.
Instant Payment Schemes (IPS): The Regional Champions
Instant Payment Schemes are Africa’s express lanes . They are fast, reliable, and increasingly popular. Examples:
Nigeria: NIBSS Instant Payments (NIP).
Kenya: PesaLink.
Ghana: GhIPSS Instant Pay.
These systems make domestic transfers feel almost magical: money moves in seconds, 24/7, at relatively low cost.
Strengths:
Speed: Real-time is now table stakes.
Banking-grade rails: Reliable infrastructure.
Scalability: Proven success within national borders.
Challenges:
Not cross-border: Most IPS are still stuck within one country.
Fragmented approach: Each nation is reinventing the wheel.
Limited interoperability: Few links between IPS networks across Africa.
Verdict: IPS is Africa’s best-kept payments secret. If countries can connect their systems, this could be the rail that truly unlocks continental scale.
Global Comparisons: Where Africa Stands
India’s UPI: A unified, interoperable instant payments system that scaled to billions of transactions. Africa is still at the fragmented stage.
EU’s SEPA: Seamless euro transfers across borders. PAPSS aspires to this, but adoption is still crawling.
U.S. FedNow: Only launched in 2023, showing Africa isn’t behind on innovation, just on integration.
The Hybrid Future: All Rails, No Silver Bullet
Here’s the reality: no single payment rail will dominate Africa’s cross-border growth. Businesses will juggle multiple options:
Use mobile money for everyday remittances.
Rely on PAPSS for AfCFTA-driven trade.
Swipe cards for global e-commerce.
Tap into IPS for domestic and (eventually) regional instant transfers.
The winners? Those who can orchestrate across rails without the user ever feeling the complexity.
Conclusion: Catching the Payments Train
Africa’s cross-border payment story isn’t about picking one rail, it’s about building the right junctions, the right interoperability, and the right trust.
At Niobi, we believe businesses shouldn’t have to choose between the boda-boda and the high-speed train. You deserve a system that gets you (and your money) across borders without detours, delays, or surprise tolls.
Because in 2025 and beyond, Africa’s payments train is leaving the station and we’re here to make sure you catch it.
