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Finding the Missing Link for Fintech in Central Africa
Tabi Joda, a Cameroonian agricultural entrepreneur, currently relies on traditional banking systems and money transfer services to conduct cross-border business from his home country. But whether from neighboring Chad or from further down south in Zimbabwe, payments for goods and services can take hours or even days to send and receive, he explains.
"If money has to take seventy-two hours from just a few kilometers, you know, it's either not just trust, but also perhaps the malfunctioning of the infrastructure."
It is not a unique story for those in Cameroon and the other states in the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CEMAC). CEMAC is a voluntary monetary union using a single currency, Central African Franc (XAF), and a single regional central bank, Banque des États de l’Afrique Centrale (Bank of Central African States, or BEAC), that unites six countries from the Central Africa Region.
Although the region has one of the oldest monetary and regional blocs under CEMAC and BEAC, infrastructure to facilitate the implementation of fintech has been a problem, and adoption remains slow. Historically, BEAC required that only banks issue e-money, and furthermore prohibited mobile network operators operating mobile wallets from processing international remittances outside the CEMAC region. This not only slowed cross-border transactions between CEMAC and the rest of the continent, but also limited the growth of fintech compared to other regional blocs in Africa.
BEAC is making strides toward incorporating new fintech and payment solutions, with the goal of reducing cross-border transaction friction. “By joining Pan African Payment Settlement Systems (PAPSS), BEAC is creating the conditions for faster, more affordable and more efficient cross-border payments between the CEMAC countries and Africa” said Yvon Sana Bangui, governor of BEAC. The bloc joining PAPSS in July 2026 will have a substantial impact on the development of fintech in the region—and it couldn’t have come at a better time.
With one of the youngest populations in the world and some of the lowest financial inclusion rates on the African continent, Central Africa is hoping to position itself as a growing digital economy through renewed efforts to build a common digital market.
As entrepreneurs navigate fragmented payment systems, limited access to finance, and uneven digital infrastructure, can a digital-native generation succeed where decades of regional integration policies have struggled? What is the cost for Central Africa if the region’s financial infrastructure continues to fail to evolve?
"If money has to take seventy-two hours from just a few kilometers, you know, it's either not just trust, but also perhaps the malfunctioning of the infrastructure."
Young Population, Old Problems
CEMACs youthful population is filtering out into the job market as the economies increasingly contend with increasing poverty levels and reduced economic growth. In 2025, the World Bank projected a slowdown in economic growth of the CEMAC region that would result in rising poverty levels, which already affect over a third of the population. Furthermore, the report indicates that most of the new jobs being created in the region are in informal sectors.
Even with the oil, gas, and mining industries, persistent political instability, including coups, civil unrest, corruption, and democratic backsliding, have further contributed to the stagnant economic growth of the regional bloc. As a result, governance watchdogs have ranked the six CEMAC member states as among the lower-performing half on the continent, with the Central African Republic, Chad, and Equatorial Guinea among the lowest-ranked.
With a burgeoning population, the region is rapidly growing and poised as an African market with untapped potential. For Joda and other entrepreneurs, the barriers to trade within the regional bloc are equally as challenging, in some instances more so than trading outside CEMAC.
“What we’re seeing in terms of Africa’s workforce transition will actually have ramifications, not just for the continent, but really for the whole world,” said Olawunmi Ola-Busari.
The limited financial integration within the bloc has slowed access to opportunities outside the borders.
Young Population, Old Problems
CEMACs youthful population is filtering out into the job market as the economies increasingly contend with increasing poverty levels and reduced economic growth. In 2025, the World Bank projected a slowdown in economic growth of the CEMAC region that would result in rising poverty levels, which already affect over a third of the population. Furthermore, the report indicates that most of the new jobs being created in the region are in informal sectors.
Even with the oil, gas, and mining industries, persistent political instability, including coups, civil unrest, corruption, and democratic backsliding, have further contributed to the stagnant economic growth of the regional bloc. As a result, governance watchdogs have ranked the six CEMAC member states as among the lower-performing half on the continent, with the Central African Republic, Chad, and Equatorial Guinea among the lowest-ranked.
With a burgeoning population, the region is rapidly growing and poised as an African market with untapped potential. For Joda and other entrepreneurs, the barriers to trade within the regional bloc are equally as challenging, in some instances more so than trading outside CEMAC.
“What we’re seeing in terms of Africa’s workforce transition will actually have ramifications, not just for the continent, but really for the whole world,” said Olawunmi Ola-Busari.
The limited financial integration within the bloc has slowed access to opportunities outside the borders.
Regional Consolidation
CEMAC was established in 1994 to deepen regional economic and monetary integration among six Central African countries after earlier integration efforts faced political and economic challenges.
Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon, although in the same monetary union, have experienced different rates of economic growth. Despite the various agreements between CEMAC countries, its members have failed to fully harmonize customs and trade barriers. In addition, Central Africa’s heavy dependency on oil has left the whole region vulnerable to shocks in the oil market.
Another challenge is the political instability of the region. Regional integration efforts often depend on a dominant member state. In CEMAC, Cameroon takes that role given the size of its population and its economic advantage. In 2020, Cameroon’s economy represented 44.6 percent of CEMAC’s overall GDP. Despite this, the movement of goods and people between Cameroon and other CEMAC members remains restricted because of border disputes and closures.
At the same time, the region continues to face shared challenges, including difficulties in controlling capital flows and monitoring money laundering and terrorist financing. Likewise, the heavy reliance on cash has constrained merchant and retail trade activities among countries within the region. Despite these challenges, the region has remained committed to advancing regional integration.
Building Connections
Prior to 2020, the CEMAC region lacked a reliable and stable payment interoperability platform to facilitate the real-time transfer of funds between commercial banks and mobile money operators. Electronic funds transfers (EFTs) were available through two old structures, the Electronic Banking Office of Central Africa (OMAC), based in Cameroon, and the Electronic Banking Office of Central Africa (SMAC), based in Gabon. These two structures managed the Interbank Electronic Payment System.
In 2020, the Groupement Interbancaire Monétique l’Afrique Centrale (GIMAC) was established to consolidate the activity of two systems: one for real-time gross settlement (RTGS), known as the Système de Gros Montants Automatisé (SYGMA), and the automated clearing house (ACH), known as Système de Télécompensation en Afrique Centrale (SYSTAC).
GIMAC launched the GIMACPAY IPS with the objective of providing end-users in the CEMAC region with a low-cost, efficient digital payment option for both domestic and cross-border payments, reinforcing the BEAC’s mission to create a cashless society and facilitate capital flows in the region.
GIMAC hoped the service would provide end users with a replacement for cash and ultimately aggregate retail payments. GIMACPAY aimed to enable real-time, cross-border transactions between different operators across all six CEMAC nations, integrating major banks and telecom operators.
GIMAC’s efforts addressed payment fragmentation within the CEMAC region. However, intra-African trade requires infrastructure that connects member states not just to each other but to the broader continent. At the time of GIMAC’s launch, no such continent-wide payment system existed. That gap prompted the African Union and African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) to act.
Building Connections
Prior to 2020, the CEMAC region lacked a reliable and stable payment interoperability platform to facilitate the real-time transfer of funds between commercial banks and mobile money operators. Electronic funds transfers (EFTs) were available through two old structures, the Electronic Banking Office of Central Africa (OMAC), based in Cameroon, and the Electronic Banking Office of Central Africa (SMAC), based in Gabon. These two structures managed the Interbank Electronic Payment System.
In 2020, the Groupement Interbancaire Monétique l’Afrique Centrale (GIMAC) was established to consolidate the activity of two systems: one for real-time gross settlement (RTGS), known as the Système de Gros Montants Automatisé (SYGMA), and the automated clearing house (ACH), known as Système de Télécompensation en Afrique Centrale (SYSTAC).
GIMAC launched the GIMACPAY IPS with the objective of providing end-users in the CEMAC region with a low-cost, efficient digital payment option for both domestic and cross-border payments, reinforcing the BEAC’s mission to create a cashless society and facilitate capital flows in the region.
GIMAC hoped the service would provide end users with a replacement for cash and ultimately aggregate retail payments. GIMACPAY aimed to enable real-time, cross-border transactions between different operators across all six CEMAC nations, integrating major banks and telecom operators.
GIMAC’s efforts addressed payment fragmentation within the CEMAC region. However, intra-African trade requires infrastructure that connects member states not just to each other but to the broader continent. At the time of GIMAC’s launch, no such continent-wide payment system existed. That gap prompted the African Union and African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) to act.
Connecting the Continent
To facilitate Africa’s ambition of operationalizing the Africa Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), the world’s largest free trade zone by number of participating countries, the African Union and Afreximbank proposed PAPSS in 2019.
Formally launched in 2022, PAPSS’s key objective was to provide a pan-African clearing house that enables banks to facilitate payments in local currencies without depending on third-party intermediaries, often based outside the continent. This would have the dual impact of drastically reducing the duration it takes to complete transactions and shave off additional transaction costs incurred with the engagement of third-party cross-continental institutions.
According to Afreximbank, this correspondent-banking dependency was costing the continent more than $5 billion a year in payment charges and lost currency value. By enabling local banks to settle directly in local currencies, PAPSS would help reduce the transaction wait period from as many as 14 days to just around 2 minutes.
Making an Impact
As of July 2026, 28 African central banks, more than 190 commercial banks, and 16 national switches have signed up for PAPSS. These include the banks from Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Gambia, Guinea, Djibouti, Rwanda, Malawi, Algeria, and Egypt.
While the full picture of PAPSS’s impact is still not clear, the system has been credited with helping lower transaction costs in some countries, from historical highs of 10–30 percent of the transfer amount down to just 1 percent. Afreximbank estimates that full adoption will save the continent billions of dollars in transaction costs annually. Meanwhile, a May 2025 report by Oui Capital, an Africa-focused venture capital firm, projects that Africa’s cross-border payments market will grow from $329 billion in 2025 to $1 trillion by 2035.
Making an Impact
As of July 2026, 28 African central banks, more than 190 commercial banks, and 16 national switches have signed up for PAPSS. These include the banks from Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Gambia, Guinea, Djibouti, Rwanda, Malawi, Algeria, and Egypt.
While the full picture of PAPSS’s impact is still not clear, the system has been credited with helping lower transaction costs in some countries, from historical highs of 10–30 percent of the transfer amount down to just 1 percent. Afreximbank estimates that full adoption will save the continent billions of dollars in transaction costs annually. Meanwhile, a May 2025 report by Oui Capital, an Africa-focused venture capital firm, projects that Africa’s cross-border payments market will grow from $329 billion in 2025 to $1 trillion by 2035.
Unrealized Potential
PAPSS, however, is yet to fully deliver its promise. While 28 countries have signed up, many are yet to incorporate PAPSS into their workflows. To fully onboard, banks require technology upgrades and staff retraining. Rollout is therefore uneven even within member countries.
Apart from the cost and logistical obstacles to fully onboarding, legacy habits also persist. Some banks and corridors still default to correspondent-bank routing out of familiarity and foreign ownership links. This effectively blunts PAPSS’s cost and speed advantages
Experts are also concerned about the impact of inconsistent policy and regulations. Kwame Oppong, former director for fintech and innovation at the Bank of Ghana, argues that regulatory harmonization across jurisdictions is essential. He notes that “the inability to operate at the same level in two different countries is a challenge,” whether for a system such as PAPSS or a fintech provider.
These challenges are continent-wide, but they carry particular weight in Central Africa, where financial inclusion remains the lowest on the continent and the infrastructure gaps are the deepest. For the CEMAC region, the stakes of getting PAPSS adoption right are higher than most.
Central Africa's Moment?
CEMAC’s enrollment in PAPSS is the latest effort toward raising the number of people formally participating in the region’s economy through formal payment systems. According to the World Bank, account ownership in Central Africa sits at roughly 33 percent, the lowest among its continental peers.
Financial inclusion rates are much higher in other regions. The higher rates, however, are largely a product of fintech adoption, particularly mobile payment platforms. For example, in East Africa, Kenya’s financial inclusion rate stands at 84.8 percent, largely driven by mobile money. Over 90 percent of Kenyan adults now use mobile money platforms. M-Pesa, the world’s inaugural mobile money service, accounts for over 34 million active users in Kenya alone.
There are already indications that the pace is picking up within the CEMAC region. BEAC data from 2024 shows over 3.9 billion transactions were conducted across 502 payment service providers. Mobile money comprised up to 94 percent of these transactions, although the transactions were heavily concentrated in one country, Cameroon, which holds 62 percent of the region’s active accounts. Notably, this activity predates CEMAC’s formal enrollment in PAPSS. BEAC only officially joined the system in July 2026, meaning the region’s existing money ecosystem represents the foundation PAPSS now has to build on, rather than evidence of its impact.
The Fintech ‘Revolution’
The adoption of fintech and mobile payment solutions in other regions of the continent has historically helped not just jumpstart financial inclusion rates but also accelerate economic growth. The launch of M-Pesa in 2007 helped propel Kenya’s financial inclusion from 26 percent to 84 percent in five years. Traditional banks, initially slow to respond, were eventually pushed to digitize their own offerings and partner with mobile money operators to retain customers. A 2016 Science study by economist Tavneet Suri of MIT and Billy Jack of Georgetown links M-Pesa to lifting roughly 2 percent of Kenyan households out of poverty, largely through increased savings and shifts in women’s labor market participation.
In Nigeria, Flutterwave has grown into a payments infrastructure company worth more than $3 billion since its founding in 2016, processing over $31 billion a year across 35 countries. Rather than competing with banks, Flutterwave positioned itself as infrastructure that banks and businesses could plug into, a model that drew established financial institutions into the broader digital payments ecosystem.
Wave, launched in Senegal in 2018, is credited with helping bring down transaction costs from highs of up to 10 percent per transaction by offering free deposits/withdrawals and a flat 1 percent transfer fee. Its aggressive pricing forced incumbent banks and money transfer operators in the region to consider their own fee structures, Wave is now valued at $1.7 billion, operates across eight countries, and has more than 20 million monthly users.
These fintech platforms also point to where PAPSS fits in. Rather than replacing them, PAPSS is designed to function at the cross-border settlement layer, enabling a Flutterwave transaction in Lagos or a Wave transfer in Dakar to settle instantly and cheaply across borders in local currencies.
Turning The Tide?
The success of fintech innovations in these regions provides proven models that could be scaled to accelerate financial inclusion and help facilitate cross-border payments across Africa.
Even within the CEMAC region, innovations such as Orange Money are showing promise of driving some change. Reporting from Business in Cameroon shows it has become a top growth driver for Orange Group, with mobile money usage in Cameroon rising from 29.9 percent to 42.7 percent between 2017 and 2022. This is proof that mobile money already works in the region. The difference is that CEMAC has not yet produced a competitor willing to slash fees the way Wave did in West Africa or M-Pesa did in East Africa. Without that competitive pressure, banks in the region have faced little urgency to modernize. PAPSS could change that dynamic. By lowering the cost of cross-border settlement, it creates the conditions for free competition to take hold across borders, not just within them.
"There needs to be harmonization of these different regulations..."
CEMAC also holds one main structural advantage compared to its regional peers: CEMAC countries have a shared currency (XAF) and a shared interoperability rail. These are advantages countries such as Kenya and Nigeria never had.
As Oge Onubogu, a senior fellow at the Center for International and Strategic Studies, points out, the rapid rise in fintech across the continent over the last few years means that the main hurdle to such cross-border payments is not technology. “It’s a problem of African institutions keeping up,” she said. “Eventually, you need institutions to be able to work together to get a harmonized system to ensure things get done. But I truly believe that this is something that will happen.”
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Photo Credits
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Special Thanks:
- The Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF)
- Bloomberg Media
- CSIS Africa Program: Oge Onubogu, Aaron Stanley, Catherine Nzuki, and Khasai Makhulo
- CSIS iDeas Lab team mentors/staff:
Story: Mark Donaldson
Video: Shawn Fok
Audio: Cera Baker
Data: Fabio Murgia
Editorial: Sarah B. Grace - CSIS AILA staff: Julieze Benjamin & Rukmini Banerjee
- AILA Management: Nina Tarr
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