Cross-border payments are central to African trade, remittances, and economic growth. Yet for thousands of businesses across the continent, they remain one of the most frustrating operational challenges: expensive, slow, and unnecessarily complex.
A Lagos-based importer paying suppliers in Guangzhou. A Nairobi tech company compensating remote developers in Eastern Europe. A Johannesburg exporter receiving payments from European buyers. These everyday business scenarios share a common pain point: the friction of international payments in Africa.
In 2025, that friction began to ease materially. The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System expanded to 19 countries. The first wallet-based cross-border corridor between Nigeria and Ghana went live. BRICS Pay moved from concept to confirmed pilot. And a new Pan-African Currency Marketplace launched to enable direct local currency exchange without a dollar intermediary.
In 2026, the question for African businesses is no longer whether cross-border payments will improve. It is how to take advantage of the infrastructure that already exists.
This guide covers everything you need to know: the scale of the market, the challenges that remain, the infrastructure that is changing the landscape, and practical steps for reducing costs and improving speed on your own cross-border payment flows.
Understanding Cross-border Payments in Africa
Cross-border payments are financial transactions where the payer and recipient are located in different countries. Unlike domestic payments that process through single-country infrastructure, international payments must navigate multiple banking systems, currencies, regulatory frameworks, and intermediaries.
The Scale of Africa’s Cross-Border Payment Market
Africa’s cross-border payments market is valued at approximately $329 billion in 2025 and projected to reach $1 trillion by 2035, representing a compound annual growth rate of around 12%. Africa receives over $96 billion in annual remittances, making it one of the world’s largest inbound remittance regions.
Several forces are driving this growth simultaneously:
AfCFTA: The African Continental Free Trade Area creates a single market of 1.3 billion people with a combined GDP of $3.4 trillion. As intra-African trade expands under AfCFTA, demand for efficient cross-border payment infrastructure grows proportionally.
Digital commerce: African businesses increasingly serve international customers and source from global suppliers. The continent is forecast to have the most significant number of digital buyers growth worldwide by 2026, according to Insider Intelligence.
SME expansion: Small and medium enterprises represent 90% of African businesses. As they expand across borders, accessible international payment solutions become operationally essential rather than optional.
Mobile money: Mobile money transaction values in Africa reached $1.4 trillion in 2023, up 39% from 2020, with significant cross-border capabilities continuing to expand.
The Current State: High Costs, Slow Speeds
Despite this massive market opportunity, Africa’s cross-border payments ecosystem faces significant challenges that create a real economic burden:
Transaction Costs: Cross-border payments in Africa average 7.4% to 8.3% in fees, far exceeding the G20 Roadmap target of 3% by 2027. Some corridors, like South Africa to Zimbabwe, see costs as high as 12.7%.
Settlement Delays: Traditional international payments can take 3-7 business days to settle, tying up working capital that businesses need for operations.
Limited Transparency: Businesses often lack visibility into payment status, which creates uncertainty and complicates cash flow management.
Regulatory Fragmentation: Africa’s 54 countries operate largely independent payment systems with limited interoperability, requiring businesses to navigate multiple regulatory frameworks.
Foreign Exchange Challenges: Currency liquidity issues result in an estimated $5 billion in annual losses, while reliance on offshore USD/EUR clearance increases transaction costs.
The Critical Challenges of Cross-border Payments in Africa
Understanding the specific obstacles facing African cross-border payments helps businesses make informed decisions about solutions:
1. Regulatory Fragmentation
Africa’s 54 countries each maintain their own central bank regulations, licensing requirements, KYC standards, and compliance frameworks. Francophone West Africa operates under OHADA law and centralised monetary authorities such as BCEAO and BEAC, while Anglophone countries like Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana maintain independent central banks. This divergence creates innovation but also fragmentation that every cross-border payment must navigate.
Currency control regimes in certain markets add documentation requirements and restrictions on outbound flows that affect both settlement timelines and cost.
2. Correspondent Banking Dependency
Most African cross-border payments still route through correspondent banks in the US, UK, or EU before reaching their destination. This model was built for a world where direct African banking relationships did not exist. It adds intermediary fees, introduces settlement delays of 3-7 days, and creates opacity: once a payment enters the correspondent banking system, real-time tracking is limited.
The move away from this model is the central infrastructure story of African payments in 2025 and 2026. PAPSS, BRICS Pay, and regional mobile money integrations all exist primarily to bypass it.
3. Foreign Exchange Volatility and Liquidity
Several African currencies experienced 5-20% annual volatility against major currencies in 2024 and 2025. For businesses with extended payment terms, this creates meaningful exchange rate risk on amounts that were priced weeks or months earlier.
More fundamentally, many African currency pairs have no liquid direct market. A business converting Nigerian naira to Ethiopian birr has historically had to convert via dollar twice: naira to dollar, then dollar to birr. Each conversion carries a spread. The African Currency Marketplace launched by PAPSS in 2025 is specifically designed to solve this by enabling direct currency pair exchange.
4. Infrastructure Fragmentation
Unlike Europe’s SEPA system or North America’s ACH network, Africa has historically lacked unified payment rails. A business operating across Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa has needed separate integrations with multiple payment providers, each with different technical requirements, documentation, and compliance processes.
This is changing but is not yet resolved. As of 2026, PAPSS connects 19 countries. The remaining 35 African countries still require alternative routing.
5. Settlement Delays and Reconciliation Complexity
Traditional cross-border settlement timelines of 3-7 business days create cash flow gaps for businesses dependent on payment timing. Matching those payments to invoices across multiple currencies and payment systems consumes significant finance team time.
Automated reconciliation platforms and faster settlement infrastructure are reducing both problems, but not all businesses have adopted them.
The Infrastructure Changing African Cross-Border Payments in 2026
Despite these challenges, 2025 has brought significant progress in African cross-border payments through technological innovation and institutional initiatives:
PAPSS: Now at 19 Countries and Growing
The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System has expanded significantly since its 2022 launch.
As of early 2026, PAPSS covers over 19 countries, connecting more than 160 commercial banks and 14 national switches, with coverage in North Africa (Morocco, Algeria, Egypt), West Africa (Nigeria, Ghana, Gambia), East Africa (Kenya via Pesalink), and expanding corridors in Southern Africa.
The most significant 2025 development was the launch of the Pan-African Currency Marketplace (PACM) in partnership with Interstellar. The PACM enables direct exchange of local currency pairs, such as Nigerian naira to Ethiopian birr, without routing through a foreign currency intermediary. This directly addresses the core FX cost problem for intra-African B2B payments.
PAPSS has reduced intra-Africa cross-border transaction costs among participating countries, enabling savings of up to 27% for end users, while helping banks experience transaction volume surges of over 1,000% through digital channel integration.
PAPSS is forecast to save Africa more than $5 billion annually in payment transaction costs, representing money previously lost to foreign currency conversions and correspondent bank routing fees.
The Nigeria-Ghana wallet corridor (February 2026) is particularly significant for Nigerian businesses. In February 2026, Onafriq and PAPSS launched a bi-directional payment corridor between Nigeria and Ghana, described as Africa’s first wallet-based outbound payment pilot from Nigeria. It allows users to send in naira and receive in cedis, eliminating the need for a dollar intermediary. This is the first live implementation of wallet-to-wallet cross-border payment between two of Africa’s largest economies.
Kenya integration (February 2026): Pesalink, Kenya’s instant payment network, partnered with PAPSS in February 2026, connecting 80+ Kenyan banks, fintechs, SACCOs, and telcos to the PAPSS network for instant 24/7 cross-border payments settled in local currencies.
PAPSSCARD: In June 2025, PAPSS launched Africa’s first continental card scheme, designed to challenge the dominance of foreign card networks and keep processing, fees, and data within Africa.
BRICS Pay: Moving from Discussion to Pilot
BRICS Pay is a decentralised cross-border payment platform developed within the BRICS Business Council framework to enable transactions in national currencies across BRICS+ member nations, bypassing dollar-based correspondent banking.
At its May 2026 ministerial meeting, BRICS reaffirmed its commitment to advancing BRICS Pay as a platform for cross-border payments in member currencies, linking national instant payment systems and Central Bank Digital Currencies.
A BRICS Pay pilot was confirmed at the 2025 Rio de Janeiro summit, with the pilot expected before end-2026. The proposed infrastructure is designed to process up to 20,000 transactions per second, enabling full-scale trade settlements in national currencies with CBDC interoperability across member states.
For African businesses, the BRICS Pay relevance is most direct for South Africa (a founding BRICS member), Egypt, and Ethiopia (BRICS members since 2024), all of which stand to gain from reduced-cost payment corridors with China, India, Brazil, and Russia.
The key distinction for 2026: BRICS Pay is a payment and settlement project, not a shared currency. It will not replace national currencies. Its practical effect will be faster, cheaper settlement between BRICS member countries in their own currencies, particularly relevant for African businesses engaged in trade with China.
Standard Bank and CIPS: The China Corridor
In November 2025, Standard Bank became the first African bank to directly participate in China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS). This enables faster, cheaper RMB transactions for Africa-China trade flows, which represent one of the continent’s largest cross-border payment corridors given the scale of Chinese-African trade and investment.
Mobile Money Cross-Border Expansion
Major mobile money platforms including MTN MoMo, Airtel Money, M-Pesa, and Wave continue expanding cross-border capabilities. Africa accounted for 66% of global mobile money transaction volume in 2022, and the cross-border extension of these networks represents a significant channel for SME cross-border payments that bypasses both banks and traditional correspondent networks.
Stablecoins and Digital Assets
Between July 2024 and June 2025, Sub-Saharan Africa received more than $205 billion in onchain value, a 52% year-on-year increase, with stablecoins playing an increasingly significant role in trade settlement, treasury management, and cross-border payments. Nigeria and Ethiopia both rank in the global top 15 for crypto adoption, driven by practical cross-border and hedging use cases rather than speculative activity.
For B2B businesses, stable coin rails offer an emerging alternative for cross-border settlement, particularly for corridors where traditional banking infrastructure is slow or expensive. Regulatory frameworks in Nigeria and South Africa are maturing to accommodate this.
Practical Solutions for Businesses: What to do now?
Practical Solutions for Businesses: What to Do Now
1. Audit Your Current Cross-Border Payment Costs
The first step is measurement. Pull your last three months of cross-border payment costs: transaction fees, FX spreads, receiving fees, and any hidden charges. Calculate your effective cost as a percentage of total cross-border volume.
If your effective rate is above 3% on intra-African corridors, you are likely using infrastructure that has not caught up with what PAPSS-connected providers can offer. If your rate is above 5% on any corridor, there is almost certainly a lower-cost alternative worth evaluating.
2. Use Multi-Currency Wallets to Manage FX Timing
Rather than converting every incoming payment immediately, hold balances in the currencies you regularly use. Convert when rates are favourable rather than at the moment of transaction. Platforms like Duplo support multi-currency wallets across 70+ currencies, allowing businesses to hold, pay, and collect in foreign currencies without forced conversion at each step.
3. Choose Providers with PAPSS Connectivity for Intra-African Payments
For payments within Africa, PAPSS-connected providers offer the most cost-efficient routing in 2026 for supported corridors. The 27% cost saving versus traditional correspondent banking is material at volume. Ask your payment provider specifically whether they route intra-African payments via PAPSS or through correspondent banks.
4. Automate Reconciliation to Recover Finance Team Time
Cross-border payments are harder to reconcile than domestic ones: different currencies, different settlement timelines, variable FX conversion applied at different moments. A payment gateway with automated reconciliation handles this natively, matching incoming funds to the correct invoice regardless of FX conversion timing. Without it, the reconciliation burden on your finance team scales with payment volume.
5. Factor Settlement Speed Into Provider Selection
A provider offering T+0 or T+1 settlement on key corridors versus one offering T+3 is a working capital difference worth calculating explicitly. On $500,000 in monthly cross-border volume, T+3 versus T+1 settlement is a $33 million annual difference in accessible working capital. Ask every provider for their specific settlement timelines by corridor and payment method.
What to Look for in a Cross-Border Payment Provider for African Businesses
When evaluating providers, these are the questions that determine actual performance rather than marketing claims:
Geographic coverage: Does the provider support your specific trade corridors, not just “Africa” generically? Nigeria-Kenya, Nigeria-South Africa, and Ghana-UK are different infrastructure problems. Verify corridor by corridor.
PAPSS connectivity: For intra-African payments, ask directly whether the provider routes via PAPSS for supported countries or through correspondent banks. The cost difference is significant.
FX transparency: Ask for the mid-market rate on your last five cross-border transactions. Compare to the rate the provider applied. The spread is your real FX cost. Any provider unwilling to show you this comparison is hiding a meaningful cost.
Settlement timelines by corridor: Not by payment method generically. By your specific corridors. A provider that settles T+1 in Nigeria but T+5 on your Lagos-Nairobi route is not a fast settlement provider for your business.
Reconciliation integration: Does the platform push reconciled data directly to your accounting system (Xero, QuickBooks, Sage) in real time, or do you export and import manually?
Regulatory compliance: Does the provider hold licences in every market where you operate? In Nigeria, this means CBN PSSP licensing and NRS e-invoicing compatibility. In South Africa, SARB compliance and FICA-aligned KYC.
NRS e-invoicing integration: For Nigerian businesses, invoices connected to cross-border payments must comply with NRS requirements. A provider that handles both payment and invoicing compliance in one workflow reduces administrative burden significantly. Read the full NRS e-invoicing guide here.
Frequently Asked Questions: Cross-Border Payments in Africa
What is the cheapest way to send money across Africa in 2026? For intra-African corridors where PAPSS is active, PAPSS-connected fintech platforms offer the lowest cost currently available, with documented savings of up to 27% versus traditional correspondent banking. For corridors not yet covered by PAPSS, mobile money platforms (where available) typically offer better rates than traditional bank wire transfers. The cheapest option depends on the specific corridor, and costs should be verified directly with providers.
How long do cross-border payments take in Africa? This varies significantly by corridor and provider. PAPSS-enabled payments settle near-instantly between connected countries. Traditional bank wire transfers still take 3-7 business days on many corridors. Mobile money cross-border transfers typically settle within hours. For B2B payments, ask your specific provider for settlement timelines on your exact corridors.
What is PAPSS and how does it work? PAPSS (Pan-African Payment and Settlement System) is a cross-border payment infrastructure operated by Afreximbank in partnership with the African Union and AfCFTA. It enables direct cross-border payments between connected African countries in local currencies, bypassing the correspondent banking system. As of early 2026, it covers 19 countries with 160+ connected commercial banks.
What is the BRICS Pay and is it relevant for African businesses? BRICS Pay is a decentralised cross-border payment platform being developed within the BRICS framework to enable payments in national currencies between member countries, reducing dollar dependency. A pilot was confirmed for before end-2026. For African businesses, it is most immediately relevant for South Africa, Egypt, and Ethiopia (BRICS members), particularly for trade with China and India.
How can Nigerian businesses reduce FX costs on international payments? Three approaches with the most immediate impact: use a provider with transparent mid-market FX rates rather than inflated bank spreads; hold multi-currency balances and convert strategically rather than at point of transaction; and for intra-African payments, use PAPSS-connected providers to eliminate unnecessary USD/EUR intermediary conversions.
What does NRS e-invoicing compliance mean for cross-border payments from Nigeria? Nigerian businesses must issue NRS-validated invoices for transactions settled in Nigeria. For cross-border payments, invoices must carry a valid Invoice Reference Number (IRN) from the NRS Merchant Buyer Solution platform. A payment provider that integrates with NRS infrastructure handles this as part of the payment workflow rather than as a separate compliance exercise.
Duplo’s Approach to Cross-border Payments
At Duplo, we’ve built our cross-border payment infrastructure specifically for businesses operating across African and international markets.
Coverage: Send and receive money in over 160 countries and 80+ currencies, with particular strength in African corridors.
Transparent Pricing: Clear, upfront pricing with competitive FX rates and no hidden markups. Save up to 85% compared to traditional banking channels.
Fast Settlement: Same-day and T+1 settlement options improve cash flow compared to traditional multi-day processing.
Unified Platform: Manage local and international payments, expense tracking, and reconciliation through a single integrated dashboard.
Automated Workflows: Build approval processes and automated payment flows that integrate with your existing operations.
Complete Visibility: Real-time tracking, comprehensive reporting, and automated reconciliation for all cross-border payments.
Local Expertise: Team with a deep understanding of African market dynamics, regulatory requirements, and business culture.
The Role of Regulatory Frameworks
Successful cross-border payment transformation requires supportive regulatory frameworks:
Current Regulatory Initiatives
G20 Roadmap for Enhancing Cross-border Payments: The G20’s multi-year program aims to address high costs, slow speeds, limited access, and insufficient transparency through 19 building blocks. The 2025 target is to reduce remittance costs to 3%.
AfCFTA Payment Integration: The African Continental Free Trade Area is driving initiatives to harmonize payment regulations and build cross-border payment infrastructure to support intra-African trade.
National Fast Payment Systems: Individual countries are implementing domestic real-time payment systems that can serve as foundations for improved international payments.
Regulatory Challenges Requiring Attention
Interoperability Standards: Need for harmonized technical standards enabling different national payment systems to connect seamlessly for cross-border payments.
KYC Harmonization: Establishing minimum data protection and privacy standards across African countries would reduce friction in international payments.
Licensing Reciprocity: Enabling payment providers licensed in one African country to operate more easily in others would enhance competition and reduce costs.
Consumer Protection: Strengthening regulations protecting businesses and individuals in cross-border payments, including clear dispute resolution and liability frameworks.
Future Trends in African Cross-border Payments
Looking ahead, several trends will shape the evolution of African international payments:
Increased Digitalization
The shift from cash to digital cross-border payments will accelerate, driven by improved infrastructure, smartphone penetration, and digital literacy.
AI and Machine Learning Integration
Artificial intelligence will enhance cross-border payment operations by improving fraud detection, automating compliance checks, enabling predictive analytics for cash flow management, and optimizing payment routing across multiple rails.
Greater Regional Integration
Regional payment systems will become more interconnected, enabling easier cross-border payments within African regions before eventually connecting continents.
Embedded Finance Expansion
Cross-border payment capabilities will increasingly be embedded into business platforms like e-commerce marketplaces, supply chain management systems, and accounting software. Making international payments seamless parts of business workflows rather than separate processes.
Central Bank Digital Currency Adoption
As CBDCs mature, they could provide efficient infrastructure for cross-border payments, particularly for government payments, large B2B transactions, and formal remittances.
Climate-Conscious Payments
Growing focus on environmental impact may drive adoption of more energy-efficient cross-border payment technologies and routes.
The Path Forward
Africa’s cross-border payments landscape stands at a transformative moment; however, the challenges are real and significant. High costs, slow speeds, regulatory complexity, and infrastructure gaps create a genuine operational burden for businesses.
But the solutions are emerging. From PAPSS to regional integration initiatives, from mobile money expansion to modern fintech platforms, the infrastructure enabling efficient, affordable international payments across Africa is being built right now.
For businesses, the question isn’t whether to optimize cross-border payments; it’s how quickly to implement solutions that eliminate friction, reduce costs, and enable growth.
The companies that succeed in Africa’s rapidly integrating economy will be those that build modern payment infrastructure, enabling them to trade seamlessly across borders. Whether you’re an SME expanding into new African markets, an enterprise managing complex international supply chains, or a digital platform serving customers across the continent, your cross-border payment capabilities directly impact your competitiveness.
The future of African commerce is connected, digital, and increasingly borderless. The businesses that invest in robust international payment infrastructure today position themselves to capture opportunities in Africa’s trillion-dollar cross-border payments market.
At Duplo, we’re committed to building payment infrastructure that makes African business easier. Our platform simplifies cross-border payments, eliminates operational friction, and gives businesses the tools they need to compete globally.
👉Sign up today to see how Duplo can help your business scale across African and international markets.
