On the money New cross-border payments tool aims to shift Africa's reliance on cash

From the tea houses of the Casbah's narrow streets to the lemonade stalls in the Roman ruins of Tipaza and the fashion stores of downtown Algiers, cash remains king in and around the capital of Africa's third-largest economy.

- Eromo Egbejule

Unlike in parts of east or west Africa, mobile money transfers are not used and only a few places take card payments.

"Ask any Algerian," said Ali Nassir, a driver with the French taxi-hailing app Heetch, which has no card payment option in Algeria. "Cash is the best thing here."

Some Algerians - including Nassir - blame the situation on the continued divergence of the dinar's official exchange rate from the dollar and the black market rate.

But across Africa, even in countries with cashless policies, cash at point of sale is still very much in demand.

Partly this is a result of a trust deficit between sellers and buyers.

"Outside of the city, many people don't want to pay online before they get their order," said Tania Chorey, the co-founder of Shoe Empire, a boutique in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. "If you send items before collecting money, sometimes people switch off their phone to avoid paying."

For many of the policy experts and merchants who attended the Intra-African Trade Fair (IATF) this month in Algiers, the biggest question was how to make real-time trade across currencies easier in cash-dominated economies without resorting to third-party operators.