Payments in Africa 2026: Mobile Money, PAPSS and Stablecoins

A spare-parts dealer in Kano's Sabon Gari market buys gearboxes from a supplier in Guangzhou, pays a cousin's logistics firm in Cotonou, and collects from mechanics across northern Nigeria. Almost none of it touches a card network. Customers pay by bank transfer on Nigeria's instant system, the Benin leg runs on a mix of cash and mobile money, and the China invoice is increasingly settled in dollar stablecoins bought through an over-the-counter desk. That is how payments in Africa look in 2026: not one system, but a stack of mobile money, national instant rails, a pan-African settlement network still finding its feet, and a growing layer of dollar tokens filling the gaps the banks leave.

This guide works through each layer with the most recent data, and argues that the big change of the next few years is not more mobile money. It is the fight over who settles cross-border trade.

Mobile money is still the base layer

Sub-Saharan Africa is the centre of the world's mobile money industry. The GSMA's State of the Industry Report 2025 counted 1.1 billion registered accounts in the region in 2024, up 19 percent and about half the global total of 2.1 billion. Transaction value in the region reached $1.1 trillion, around two-thirds of the global $1.68 trillion. There were 165 live services in Sub-Saharan Africa alone.

Kenya remains the reference market. The Central Bank of Kenya reported 95.31 million registered mobile money accounts in August 2026, a count inflated by the fact that many people hold several wallets and SIM cards, served by 563,605 active agents. Those agents handled 227.41 million cash-in and cash-out transactions worth KSh 761.13 billion in that single month. The agent network is the clue to what mobile money really is: a bridge between cash and digital, not a replacement for cash. Our M-Pesa explainer covers how the model works.

Mobile money also carries cross-border flows. The GSMA put international remittances through mobile money at $34 billion in 2024, up 22 percent, across about 270 million transactions.

The averages show what kind of money this is. Globally, the GSMA counted around 108 billion mobile money transactions in 2024 worth $1.68 trillion, which works out to roughly $15.60 per transaction. In Kenya's August 2026 data, the average agent cash transaction was about KSh 3,350. These are airtime top-ups, school fees, market purchases and wages for day labourers. Mobile money is a high-volume, low-value system, and that is precisely why it reached people banks never served.

It also has limits that matter for the next phase. Wallet balances are usually capped, so they are poorly suited to business payments of any size. Interest on balances is rare. Cross-border use depends on bilateral deals between operators. And because most wallets are denominated in the local currency, they offer no protection when that currency falls, which is where the dollar layer described below comes in.

Instant payment systems are catching up

Alongside mobile money, central banks have built national instant payment systems that link banks, and increasingly wallets. The AfricaNenda Foundation's SIIPS 2025 report counts 36 live instant payment systems in Africa. Eleven now support cross-border transactions, up from six a year earlier, and ten support government payments to citizens. Nigeria's NIBSS Instant Payments, launched in 2011, is the continent's oldest large-scale example and is the rail most Nigerian businesses actually use day to day.

The policy direction is interoperability. A wallet user should be able to pay a bank account holder or a user of a competing wallet without friction. Where that has happened, volumes have grown quickly. Where mobile money operators and banks still run closed loops, users carry several wallets and move money between them through agents. For the global comparison, see instant payments around the world.

PAPSS and the intra-African trade problem

Here is the core inefficiency. A Ghanaian importer paying a Kenyan exporter has traditionally had to buy US dollars, send them through correspondent banks in New York or London, and have the Kenyan bank convert them back into shillings. Two conversions, several intermediaries, and days of delay for a trade that never involved America. Each conversion carries a spread, and each intermediary bank can hold the payment for compliance checks. For a small exporter, the result is working capital locked up in transit and an FX cost that is hard to see on the invoice.

The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System, launched publicly in January 2022 by Afreximbank and the African Union, is meant to fix that by settling in local currencies across borders. Its network page, last updated in July 2026, shows 21 central banks including the regional BEAC, among them Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Egypt, Morocco, Zambia and Zimbabwe, plus a dozen national switches.

PAPSS has solved the plumbing. It has not yet solved the liquidity.

Our view is that PAPSS is promising but under-used. Connecting central banks is the easy part. The hard part is FX liquidity between thinly traded currency pairs, such as the Ghanaian cedi and the Kenyan shilling, without falling back on the dollar. Until there is a deep market for those pairs, many banks will continue routing through dollars, and businesses will keep looking for faster dollar alternatives. Correspondent banking's role is explained in our correspondent banking guide.

Stablecoins: the dollar layer nobody planned

That gap is where stablecoins have grown. Chainalysis's 2025 Sub-Saharan Africa report found the region received over $205 billion in on-chain value between July 2024 and June 2025, up roughly 52 percent, making it the third fastest-growing region in the world. Nigeria alone received over $92.1 billion, nearly triple South Africa in second place. Kenya, Ethiopia and Ghana rank in the regional top five.

The use cases are specific. Chainalysis describes stablecoins supporting regular multi-million-dollar transfers tied to trade between Africa, the Middle East and Asia, and a growing business-to-business sector in Nigeria and South Africa. At the retail end, over 8 percent of the region's transfer value was in amounts under $10,000, against about 6 percent elsewhere. USDT serves as a practical dollar substitute where official dollar access is rationed and the gap between official and parallel exchange rates is wide. Chainalysis links spikes in activity to naira devaluations, including one that drove monthly regional volume close to $25 billion.

Regulators are responding with licensing regimes rather than bans, though approaches differ widely. We track them in stablecoin regulation by country.

Country snapshot

Country	Tech funding 2025	Change	On-chain activity	Payments feature
Kenya	$1.04B	+72%	Top five in region	95.31M mobile money accounts (Aug 2026)
South Africa	$715M	+21%	Second largest; large-ticket, arbitrage-heavy	Bank-led, card-heavy, hundreds of registered VASPs
Egypt	$604M	+37%	Not in Chainalysis SSA set	Africa's largest remittance recipient
Nigeria	$572M	-3%	Largest: over $92.1B received	NIBSS instant payments since 2011

Funding figures are total equity and debt from Partech; on-chain data is from Chainalysis for July 2024 to June 2025.

Where the money is going: fintech funding

African tech funding recovered in 2025. Partech's 2025 Africa report recorded about $4.1 billion in total equity and debt, up 25 percent from $3.25 billion, across 570 deals. Debt reached a record $1.64 billion, around 41 percent of the total. Kenya, South Africa, Egypt and Nigeria took about 72 percent of the money.

Fintech, long the dominant sector, went the other way. It raised $1.49 billion in total, down 12 percent, and only $769 million in equity, down 43 percent. Investors are not abandoning payments. They are getting pickier, preferring revenue-backed debt over equity, and favouring infrastructure and B2B flows over another consumer wallet. That fits the trade-settlement story above.

A worked example: the cost of moving $200

Sub-Saharan Africa has long been the world's most expensive region to send money to. AfricaNenda, citing World Bank data, put the 2024 average at 8.45 percent of a $200 transfer. Here is what that looks like in practice.

1. A worker in Johannesburg sends $200 to family in Lilongwe. At 8.45 percent, the cost is about $16.90, leaving roughly $183 to arrive.
2. The GSMA's figures imply an average mobile money international remittance of about $126 ($34 billion over 270 million transactions). At the same 8.45 percent, that transfer would cost about $10.65.
3. Compare the 6.36 percent global average in Q3 2025: on $200, the cost would be $12.72, about $4.18 less per transfer than the African average.
4. For a family receiving $200 a month, that gap alone is about $50 a year, before any FX margin hidden in the rate.

The cheapest routes now tend to be wallet-to-wallet, where both ends are digital and no agent cash-out is needed. The expensive part is the last mile, which is why mobile money agents remain so important. For more on corridor costs see why sending money to Africa costs so much.

What to watch next

• Monthly CBK data: Kenya's agent cash-out volumes are the best real-time indicator of whether digital money is staying digital.
• Late 2026 and 2027: new central banks joining PAPSS and, more importantly, whether its local-currency FX market develops real depth.
• December 2026: the World Bank's annual remittance estimates, which will show whether Egypt keeps its lead over Nigeria.
• Early 2027: the GSMA's next State of the Industry report on mobile money and Partech's 2026 funding data.
• Ongoing: stablecoin licensing in Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa, which will decide whether the dollar layer moves into the regulated system or stays in OTC markets. Businesses weighing this can start with stablecoin payments for business.

This article describes market data and is not investment advice. Rules on crypto assets differ by country; check with a qualified adviser before acting.

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