African banks understand Africa better – and that matters for the future of payments

AFRICA'S payment ecosystem has long been defined by accessibility. In many markets, millions of people operated outside the formal banking system, relying on cash or informal transfers to move money.

- 

Out of this gap emerged one of the continent's most striking financial shifts: the rapid rise of mobile-enabled wallets and fintech platforms that gave people a way to transact securely, even without a traditional bank account.

Necessity was the primary driver of this innovation and African banks played a central role in scaling and securing these new channels.

The effect was transformative. Low-value domestic transactions and remittance flows once slow, costly, and unreliable could now move quickly across platforms designed for the way African economies actually function.

By embedding these flows into formal systems, banks and their partners helped expand financial access, draw liquidity into regulated channels, and demonstrate that Africa could pioneer solutions where traditional models had failed to reach.

This was, in many ways, the first phase of Africa's payments transformation: a demonstration that when solutions are built for local conditions, adoption follows at scale.

That lesson is even more critical for the next phase.

The challenge today is more about integration than inclusion enabling cross-border and higher-value flows that underpin trade, infrastructure, and investment.

Here, too, Africa cannot depend on frameworks designed elsewhere.

As global correspondent banks recede, it is African institutions that are stepping forward to provide the networks, the credit, and the regulatory alignment to keep capital moving. Just as they helped reimagine everyday payments, African banks are now central to shaping the systems that will determine the continent's financial future.