• Nigeria’s NIP ranks among the world’s largest real-time payment platforms, underscoring its central role in Africa’s economy and trade across it
• Africa’s real-time payments boom now fuels geopolitical rivalry as India, China, and Europe compete to shape the continent’s future digital infrastructure.
• Interoperability and currency fragmentation remain decisive challenges, determining whether Africa builds true continental rails or isolated payment islands

Africa is experiencing a pivotal moment in the evolution of its digital payments landscape. Between June 2024 and June 2025, the continent recorded the fastest expansion of instant payment systems (IPS) in its history. The State of Inclusive Instant Payment Systems in Africa 2025 report shows that five new domestic systems—Algeria’s Switch Mobile, Eswatini’s Fast Payment Module, Libya’s LYPay, Sierra Leone’s Salon Pement Switch, and Somalia’s SIPS—went live within just twelve months, raising the number of operational IPS from 31 to 36.

Since launching its instant payments platform in September 2025, the UEMOA region has added six new systems in little more than a year. Africa, long perceived as lagging behind more established regions, is now moving at a remarkable pace to close the digital payments gap. Moreover, on November 11, 2025, the East African Community launched a pilot initiative linking Rwanda and Tanzania to test a regional instant payment network. The pilot, conducted under the EAC Digital Integration Program, aims to lay the foundation for a cross-border real-time payments infrastructure spanning the region.

 It marked the first practical attempt to build a continental-scale real-time payment corridor, demonstrating not only the feasibility of instant transfers across sovereign borders but also the growing appetite among African blocs to reduce fragmentation and improve the speed, cost, and transparency of cross-border transactions.

Nigeria’s Dominance and a New Global Battle for Influence

Nigeria continues to dominate this accelerating landscape. Its NIBSS Instant Payment system (NIP) has grown into one of the world’s largest real-time payment platforms, processing 11 billion transactions in 2024, up from 2 billion in 2020. Transaction values surged from USD 457 billion to USD 1.1 trillion over the same period, underscoring the immense centrality of instant payments to Nigeria’s financial life.

NIP now serves nearly 58 million unique users—approximately half of the adult population—and in 2025 became the first African system to reach what SIIPS classifies as “mature inclusivity,” meeting strict thresholds for affordability, accessibility, governance transparency, and consumer protection. Nigeria’s trajectory places it on par with global pioneers such as India’s UPI and Brazil’s PIX, not only in scale but in national economic relevance.

Africa’s race toward real-time payments is no longer a purely domestic story; it has become a strategic field for geopolitical and technological competition. India, China, and Europe have all positioned themselves as partners—or contenders—seeking to supply the infrastructure, technologies, and standards that will underpin Africa’s payment future. India sees Africa as the natural next frontier for the UPI model, offering a low-cost digital public infrastructure template that many African central banks are interested in.

China, already deeply embedded in African fintech ecosystems, is strengthening its presence through hardware, QR payment standards, and large-scale digital infrastructure partnerships. Europe, for its part, brings decades of regulatory experience through SEPA and a mature ecosystem of instant payments technology vendors. For these global powers, Africa’s digital payments boom is not simply an export market; it is a space where influence over future economic and data architectures is at stake.

Interoperability, Currency Challenges

Beyond the technological race, the stakes for Africa itself are far more structural. Instant payments have become a critical enabler for the continent’s ambitious integration agenda. Seamless, affordable, and real-time digital transactions could support the expansion of intra-African trade, strengthen supply chains, and reduce the overwhelming reliance on cash that continues to constrain formal economic growth.

If successful, the expansion of IPS could help dismantle trade barriers, accelerate formalization, and provide small businesses and consumers with a unified, low-cost gateway to the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). But if this transition fails—if systems remain fragmented, unreliable, or too costly to use—Africa risks entrenching inefficiencies that would reinforce informal markets and create new digital borders even as physical borders open.

The question of interoperability lies at the heart of this tension. Africa’s payments landscape remains highly fragmented, with incompatible messaging standards, proprietary mobile money platforms, and parallel bank-led and telecom-led systems that rarely communicate seamlessly. While domestic IPS deployments have multiplied, meaningful cross-border interoperability remains rare. Only 11 systems on the continent currently support cross-border transactions, and most operate within narrow bilateral or regional corridors.

The SIIPS report highlights that technical interoperability—through ISO 20022 standards, API-based integrations, or regional switches—could drastically reduce transaction costs and unlock shared efficiencies, mirroring the experience of linked IPS networks in Asia and Europe. Without such coordination, Africa risks building a patchwork of sophisticated national systems that nevertheless fail to enable continental-scale economic activity.

The Stakes for African Integration

Yet even if interoperability is achieved, Africa will continue to grapple with a deeper structural challenge: its fragmented currency landscape. High FX spreads, volatility, and shallow currency markets drive up the cost of cross-border transfers regardless of how fast the underlying infrastructure becomes.

Even innovative systems like PAPSS must navigate the reality that instant settlement across dozens of currencies inherently carries financial frictions. In this respect, Africa’s challenge is not solely technological—it is macroeconomic. Until regional currency cooperation mechanisms emerge, real-time payments will not eliminate the high costs that burden African traders and consumers.

Despite these obstacles, the opportunities are seen as transformative. Africa is not merely catching up; it is redefining the frontier of inclusive digital payments. The unprecedented wave of IPS launches, the East African pilot, Nigeria’s leadership, and the global competition now unfolding around Africa’s payment infrastructures all signal a profound shift.

If Africa succeeds in building interconnected, affordable, and sustainable instant payment rails, it could emerge as the world’s largest integrated real-time payments zone—a catalyst for trade, financial inclusion, and economic modernization. If it fails, the continent risks creating 36 digital islands — advanced but isolated — unable to deliver on the promise of continental integration.

Idriss Linge