For decades, a business in Accra paying a supplier in Lagos had to route the transaction through a bank in London or New York, converting cedis to dollars and dollars back to naira along the way. That detour added cost, delay, and a dependence on foreign currency that never made much sense for trade happening entirely within Africa. The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System, or PAPSS, was built to close that loop — and four years after launch, it's starting to show what closing it actually looks like.
From Pilot to Plumbing
PAPSS now connects more than 19 countries and over 160 commercial banks, spanning North Africa, West Africa, and corridors reaching into East and Southern Africa. Kenya joined the network in February through a partnership between PAPSS and Pesalink, the country's instant payment switch, linking more than 80 Pesalink participants to the wider PAPSS system and settling transactions in local currencies rather than dollars. In July, the Bank of Central African States signed on as well, and West Africa's central bank has laid out a roadmap to link its own instant payment platform into the network. What started as a single settlement rail is turning into a mesh of connected national systems.
What It's Actually Saving
The core promise of PAPSS is straightforward: settle African trade in African currencies. By cutting out the dollar or euro middle step, the system has trimmed cross-border transaction costs for participating users by as much as 27 percent, and banks that integrate their digital channels with PAPSS have reported transaction volumes surging more than tenfold. In February, PAPSS and Onafriq launched a wallet-based payment corridor between Nigeria and Ghana that lets users send naira and have the recipient receive cedis directly — no intermediary currency involved, and no need for either party to hold a hard-currency account.
New Products, Bigger Ambitions
PAPSS isn't stopping at basic settlement. In partnership with the African deep-tech firm Interstellar, it launched a currency marketplace that allows direct trading between African currency pairs — Nigerian naira to Ethiopian birr, for instance — without a foreign intermediary. Afreximbank and Mercury Payment Services have also rolled out a PAPSS-linked card product, aimed at giving the system a retail-facing presence beyond bank-to-bank transfers. Together, these moves suggest PAPSS is positioning itself as more than a payment rail — it wants to be the backbone of a genuinely pan-African financial system, one that supports the trade ambitions of the African Continental Free Trade Area.
The Gap Between Promise and Practice
None of this has fully closed the friction gap yet. Users on the Nigeria-Ghana corridor have reported transaction limits, delays, and confusion over which banks are actually live on the system — one Ghana-based professional told a regional outlet he had to open a separate account just to reliably receive payments from Nigerian clients, pointing to gaps in data-sharing between institutions that PAPSS hasn't fully solved. Thirty-five African countries still sit outside the network, meaning most cross-border transactions on the continent still route through the correspondent banking system PAPSS was built to bypass.
Why This Matters for DPI
PAPSS is a useful test case for what digital public infrastructure looks like when it's applied to money rather than identity or data. The technology existed for a while — what took time was the coordination: getting fifteen-plus central banks, hundreds of commercial banks, and national payment switches to agree on a shared rail. That coordination problem, more than any single piece of technology, is the real story of DPI in African financial services right now.
