Payment News

The Next Step for Africa’s Fintechs

A Finextra article argues that Africa’s successful fintechs need to move on to tackle interoperability if they are to thrive ¹.

Africa has shown that digital payments can be implemented on a large scale but now needs payment systems to be part of an integrated infrastructure so that users can transfer funds seamlessly across wallets, banks, merchants, and borders and merchants can manage multiple payment channels with low costs. Regional trade needs quick, low-cost cross-border payments that aren’t reliant on hard-currency routes.

Early fintech success was established through isolated networks and optimising individual platforms. The result was limited wallet-to-wallet transfers, weak bank-wallet connections, complex merchant acceptance processes, and regulatory blind spots. While this fragmentation inflated costs and complicated user experience, it also restricted scalability.