First published by TechCabal on July 27, 2026: https://techcabal.com/2026/07/27/africas-payment-rails-have-a-participation-problem/

A media training in Abidjan hosted by AfricaNenda Foundation examined how instant payment systems are developing across Africa and highlighted a central challenge for the continent’s payment infrastructure: speed is improving faster than inclusion.

Africa now has 36 domestic and regional instant payment systems, but relatively few satisfy the broader inclusion criteria used by AfricaNenda to assess payment rails. The gap is significant because governments, banks and fintech companies are investing heavily in payment infrastructure, yet faster settlement alone does not expand access. If only a limited group of institutions can use the rails directly, large parts of the digital economy remain outside them.

The emphasis on speed has long shaped technology industry discussions about payments, including whether transfers settle in three seconds or 30 seconds. But once payments become fast enough for practical use, another second of improvement matters less than who can access the system, what users pay, and which institutions are allowed to connect. Those questions are increasingly central to Africa’s payments challenge.

Fast does not always mean inclusive

An instant payment system has a relatively clear function: it should operate continuously, move money almost immediately, and give users certainty that a completed transaction is final. AfricaNenda’s State of Inclusive Instant Payment Systems (SIIPS) framework goes beyond speed by assessing who participates, which channels people can use, whether different financial institutions can transact with one another, and whether the economics support low-value payments.

Participation in this context is not only about how many people can send money. It also concerns whether banks, fintechs, mobile money operators and other regulated institutions can reach the core infrastructure on fair and practical terms.

A switch that moves money between banks in two seconds can still exclude other players if a fintech or mobile money operator must connect through a sponsor bank. In that case, the transaction may be instant, but access to the infrastructure is unequal. The bank becomes a gatekeeper and may add costs as well as another commercial relationship between the switch and the company trying to serve customers.

The same issue appears at the consumer level. Infrastructure built primarily around smartphones and banking apps can serve some users well while excluding people who rely on USSD, agents, or feature phones. Flat transaction fees can also be disproportionately expensive for people making small transfers. As a result, Africa can build technically advanced payment infrastructure that mainly improves payments for people who already have reliable access to financial services.

Nigeria offers a lesson

Nigeria stands out in AfricaNenda’s inclusivity rankings because the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS) Instant Payment, or NIP, has reached the framework’s Mature category. Its position is supported by a broad payments market that includes banks, microfinance institutions, mobile money providers and other financial companies.

The infrastructure also supports frequent, relatively small transfers, making instant payments part of everyday commerce rather than mainly a bank transfer product.

However, treating NIBSS as a model that every African market should reproduce overlooks an important point: payment systems reflect the economies and regulatory environments around them. Nigeria has more than 200 million people, a large financial sector and years of policy aimed at increasing electronic payments. Smaller markets cannot replicate those economics simply by copying Nigeria’s architecture.

There are also limits to what an inclusivity ranking can show. A switch can perform well on participation, interoperability and access while users still encounter fraud, failed transactions, unclear charges or poor dispute resolution. Payment infrastructure should ultimately be assessed both by its architecture and by what happens when an ordinary customer sends money and something goes wrong.

PesaLink reflects the market that built it

Kenya’s PesaLink offers a different example. Operated by Integrated Payment Services Limited (IPSL) and developed by the banking industry, PesaLink addressed a specific problem: allowing customers to move money between bank accounts without relying on slower traditional interbank processes.

PesaLink remains heavily centered on banks, while Kenya’s payments market has evolved around a wider set of players. For millions of people, a mobile wallet effectively functions as their primary transaction account. M-PESA is central to everyday transfers and merchant payments, Savings and Credit Cooperatives (SACCOs) serve a large section of the population, and fintechs connect consumers, merchants and financial institutions.

A system can therefore connect Kenya’s banks while still missing a large share of the country’s routine payment activity. But describing that as a failure would be too simple. PesaLink was built as bank infrastructure, and judging it only against the more recent idea of national digital public infrastructure ignores the original problem it was created to solve.

Kenya could expand PesaLink into a broader national rail, or it could focus on building a layer that allows existing payment networks to communicate more cheaply and easily. The distinction matters because interoperability does not necessarily require every participant to use the same switch.

Kenya may need better rules, not another dominant rail

Kenya does not lack ways to move money. It already has banks, M-PESA, Airtel Money, SACCO infrastructure, card networks, PesaLink and fintech payment platforms. The larger problem is what happens when money needs to move between those systems.

That suggests policymakers may be focusing too much on which platform should become the national rail. A more useful objective could be making transfers between existing systems cheap, predictable and technically straightforward, regardless of who owns the underlying infrastructure.

A bank-owned switch should not automatically limit participation to banks. At the same time, opening infrastructure should not mean giving every institution identical settlement rights regardless of its capital, risk controls or operational capacity.

This is where the inclusion debate becomes more complex. Direct access can remove intermediaries and reduce costs, but it also shifts more responsibility to individual participants. A poorly capitalized provider with direct settlement access can create risks beyond its own customers. Open access without strong supervision is not necessarily inclusive; it can simply redistribute risk.

Pricing creates another trade-off. Lower fees matter, especially for small transactions, but making payments cheaper for users does not eliminate the underlying costs of infrastructure, fraud controls, compliance and dispute resolution. Treating payment infrastructure as a public utility changes the question from how much it costs to who should bear that cost, while still requiring low-value transactions to remain economically viable.

The harder problem begins at the border

Cross-border payments show the limits of domestic progress. A Kenyan business can move money locally almost instantly, but paying a supplier in another African country can still involve additional intermediaries, foreign exchange costs and longer settlement processes.

Systems such as the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) and the East African Payment System are designed to address parts of this problem, while domestic switches, including PesaLink, are looking beyond their original markets.

Connecting payment systems, however, is only one part of the challenge. Countries still have different currencies, foreign exchange rules, licensing requirements, capital controls and approaches to financial crime. Better technology cannot remove those differences by itself.

That may be the more useful way to view Africa’s instant payment systems. In many markets, the continent no longer has a payment speed problem. The unresolved questions are about access, economics and control: who can connect directly, who sets the price, who carries settlement risk, what happens when transactions fail, and whether competing networks can communicate without forcing everyone onto one privately controlled system.

Speed made instant payments possible. The harder task now is determining who can access the rails, on what terms, and who controls the points where those rails meet.

Kenn Abuya is a senior reporter at TechCabal and leads its Startups Desk.