For four years, the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) has been building the plumbing for a more connected African economy. Since launching in January 2022, the payment network says it currently connects 30 African countries, 24 central banks, about 200 financial institutions and more than 16 payment switches.
Cross-border payments that once took three to five days to clear now settle in an average of seven seconds, within the 120-second guarantee the system was designed to meet, according to PAPSS. PAPSS also says it has reduced the cost of cross-border money transfers by up to 95%, while transaction volumes have grown by more than 1,000% over the past year.
PAPSS was launched by the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) in partnership with the African Union and the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) as a continent-wide payment infrastructure for African trade. If African countries were to trade more with one another, they would need a payment system that could move money between them without routing every transaction through financial infrastructure outside the continent.
The problem lies within a larger gap: intra-African trade accounted for just 14.4% of Africa’s total trade in 2024, while Sub-Saharan Africa was the most expensive region for sending remittances, with the average cost reaching 8.45% in Q1 2025.
PAPSS was built to tackle the payment side of that problem by providing a common infrastructure that connects central banks, commercial banks, payment switches, fintechs, and other payment providers, enabling money to move between African markets.
PAPSS’ operational model eliminates the need to route local currency transactions through dollars or euros before settlement in the recipient’s local currency. The base layer of that model is what PAPSS calls the multilateral net settlement. Rather than settling each transaction between two countries individually, PAPSS nets the flows in each direction and only moves the difference.
“If $10 million worth of transactions is going into Ghana, and $9 million is going from Ghana into Nigeria,” CEO Mike Ogbalu III said at a media briefing in Lagos on September 7, “our system says that only the $1 million equivalent is what will change hands.”
He said that between 80% and 90% of that net balance is currently being settled in local currencies, depending on the corridor and the extent of adoption in each market.
PAPSS also launched a Pan-African Currency Marketplace (PACM) in 2025, in collaboration with the African deep-tech company Interstellar. PAPSS’ currency marketplace operates as a direct matching system that enables African currencies to be exchanged at prevailing exchange rates in the countries (e.g., Nigerian naira to Ethiopian Birr). Ogbalu explained that the system was created to address the continent’s fragmented currencies and limited convertibility.
Yet a payment network can exist in a country without becoming part of how businesses and consumers make payments. In some markets, banks have integrated PAPSS into their digital channels, moving beyond branches, while in others, access remains more limited, with adoption shaped by regulatory requirements, technological infrastructure, awareness, and the speed at which local financial institutions integrate the system.
That unevenness is important as PAPSS moves into its next phase. Ogbalu said the first phase of PAPSS was focused on building the system and connecting the ecosystem. The next phase will focus on deepening that network and getting its capabilities closer to the businesses and consumers it was built to serve.
“We want to take the value that we’ve created and actually make it available where it matters most to the end users,” Ogbalu said.
This changes what success looks like for PAPSS, as it must answer whether the businesses and consumers in those connected markets actually use it and whether the activity flowing through it begins to reflect the trade PAPSS was built to support.
Why adoption lags where it does
PAPSS may now stretch across 30 countries, but its footprint is not the same as its reach. In some markets, banks have integrated the system into their digital channels and are actively processing payments. In others, adoption is still held back by the regulatory process, the strength of the local fintech ecosystem, the infrastructure available to connect to PAPSS and whether businesses and consumers know they can use it.
The first of those factors sits with central banks. Ogbalu described their involvement as the biggest lever in determining how quickly PAPSS takes hold in a market. In countries where more than 90% of commercial banks have adopted PAPSS, including Ghana and Nigeria, central-bank support has helped push banks towards integration.
Every commercial bank that wants to connect to PAPSS must first obtain a letter of no objection from its central bank, a formal sign-off confirming the regulator’s approval of the bank’s participation in the network. Where approval moves quickly, banks can join the network and start building products around it. Where regulators move more cautiously, the process slows.
How much a regulatory decision can shape a payment market is clear from Kenya. In 2007, when there was no clear regulatory framework for mobile money, the Central Bank of Kenya issued Safaricom a letter of no objection to launch M-Pesa, subject to safeguards against fraud and money laundering, as well as requirements for record-keeping and consumer protection. M-Pesa grew from one million users in its first nine months to four million within 18 months.
PAPSS’s progress cannot be separated from the financial ecosystems in each country. Data from Disrupt Africa counted 217 fintech startups in Nigeria in 2023, compared with 35 in Ghana, 29 in Uganda, 10 in Rwanda, four in Ethiopia and three in Zimbabwe.
The difference matters because PAPSS’ infrastructure becomes useful when local banks and payment providers build it into products that customers already use. A country with more fintech companies offers PAPSS more potential channels to reach merchants and consumers than one with a smaller ecosystem.
The underlying payment infrastructure creates another layer of unevenness. PAPSS can connect to a country’s payment system, but the usefulness of that connection depends on what already exists locally and who can access it.
AfricaNenda’s 2024 State of Inclusive Instant Payment Systems report found 31 live instant payment systems across the continent as of June 2024. The report also found that none of Africa’s instant payment systems had reached the highest level of maturity in terms of inclusivity.
Ogbalu acknowledged that PAPSS has had to account for these differences rather than assume every market can be onboarded in the same way. Some countries, he said, require investment in their payment infrastructure before they can fully take advantage of what PAPSS has built.
Taken together, these constraints explain why being connected to PAPSS does not automatically mean a market is actively using it. Ogbalu said this is part of what PAPSS wants to unlock in its next phase of operations.
Entering phase two
PAPSS’s answer to all the unevenness is a shift in what the company is optimising for within the countries it already operates in.
“In phase one, we dealt with spread,” Ogbalu said. “Today, in our phase two, is going to be all about deepening.”
According to Ogbalu, that means putting more products and services on top of the infrastructure PAPSS has already built, and making it easier for other companies to do the same. The company wants financial institutions to develop merchant-facing products, remittance services and export-related services using its network. It said it is also seeing demand for a single API that would let technology companies access PAPSS-connected accounts across multiple markets without having to build separate integrations for each market.
The company is also trying to make the network useful beyond Africa. PAPSS says it expects to connect to major payment systems in China and India by the first quarter of 2027, with Brazil expected later. The aim is to give African businesses a way to connect to international markets without losing the benefits of infrastructure built around African currencies and payment systems.
However, the immediate focus is closer to home. PAPSS expects to reach about 38 countries by the end of 2026 and onboard all 54 African countries within the next five years.
PAPSS has spent its first four years proving that a continent-wide payment infrastructure can be built; its next five will show whether that infrastructure can become part of how Africa actually trades.
True scale demands moving beyond surface-level integrations to robust execution. We’ve filtered the noise out of Moonshot 2026, optimising the conference strictly for high-calibre connections between startup founders, global financial operators, enterprise leaders and individuals rewiring Africa’s technical frameworks. Get 20% off Early Bird tickets for a limited time.
