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Real-time payments in Africa: unlocking digital growth

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Across Africa, real-time payments are transforming how people and businesses move money - faster, safer, and more efficiently than ever before. From e-commerce businesses in South Africa to fintech start-ups in the commercial hub of Lagos, Nigeria, the continent is undergoing a digital financial revolution.

This blog explores the current landscape, challenges, and opportunities for real-time payments in Africa, and how global lessons can help shape a more inclusive financial future.

The region in numbers:

These trends highlight that Africa is building on an already strong foundation. Mobile money has established a widespread habit of using mobile devices to manage and move money. Real-time payment systems build on this foundation by extending a similar intuitive, phone-based experience into a broader and more interoperable ecosystem, connecting banks, mobile money providers, fintechs, and merchants, while supporting a wider range of use cases beyond closed-loop wallets.

However, this growth is unlikely to be evenly distributed across the continent as it will be dependent on individual market factors, including internet connectivity, regulation, infrastructure capabilities, and consumer confidence.

So how can the continent as a whole best position itself to maximize the growth opportunities of real-time payments?

How do instant payments support financial inclusion in Africa?

In Africa, where around 400 million people remain unbanked, people in the region are underserved by traditional banking due to limited branch networks, high account maintenance costs, or geographic barriers. Instant payments can help bring more people into the digital economy by making real-time payment transactions more accessible and convenient. Faster payment systems enable individuals and businesses to send and receive money seamlessly, and access their finances using mobile phones and digital wallets.

Kenya - an exciting trajectory

Kenya launched its real-time payments system – PesaLink – in 2017.  PesaLink enables consumers to transfer funds between bank accounts instantly and supports multiple currencies. This improved the previous two-day payment cycle that customers and businesses relied on. Since its launch, digital payments adoption has grown, with PesaLink processing steady transaction volumes alongside Kenya’s well-established mobile money ecosystem. Opportunities for further growth and scale remain as the market continues to evolve.

The 2025 FinAccess data shows that cash still accounts for around 72% of daily retail payments, while mobile money accounts for about 28%. However, behavior is more mixed when looking beyond daily transactions. The same data indicates that only 27% of consumers are cash-only, while 31% rely solely on mobile money and 42% use a combination of both cash and mobile money. This suggests that while digital adoption is growing, real-time payments still account for a relatively small share of total transactions.  

There are a number of possible explanations for this low transaction rate, notably the inaccessibility of bank accounts for many citizens, and the dominance and ubiquity of mobile money in the Kenyan market.”

Helen Stoner, Head of Real-Time Payment Sales, Mastercard

For many Kenyans – particularly those who don’t have access to traditional banking – mobile money presents a practical alternative to real-time payments.

Recognizing barriers is the first step to overcoming them, and this is a key step on the journey to widespread adoption of any faster payment system.

Facing challenges, together

To drive meaningful progress, it’s important that countries across Africa have the opportunity to benefit from the growth potential of real-time payments in ways that reflect their local market dynamics. While each market is unique in its requirements and stage of development — and some have already made strong progress in areas such as interoperability and access - there are still common obstacles to overcome, including:

Financial crime is a growing concern globally, and in many regions across Africa, the stakes are especially high. Mobile money has transformed access - but much of it still runs in closed systems. By enabling interoperability and connecting to real-time payment rails, we have a real opportunity to boost financial security and financial health, particularly for women and youth. Progress will depend on smart, forward-looking regulation and collaboration across the ecosystem.”

Helen Stoner, Head of Real-Time Payment Sales, Mastercard

Addressing these challenges will empower more countries in Africa to unlock the many benefits of digitization and instant payments. Efforts are already underway to explore ways to overcome these challenges, and collaboration is proving key to doing so:

  • The Kenyan Banking Association worked with banks and other industry stakeholders to migrate PesaLink from ISO 8583 to ISO 20022, unlocking new use cases that provide potential for scale, such as Request to Pay, payment initiation, and direct debits.
  • Global fintech Nium partnered with Ecobank, a pan-African bank, to bring real-time capabilities to 35 African markets. By connecting Nium’s payment rails with Ecobank’s existing SWIFT messaging system, the collaboration has brought real-time payment services to Ecobank’s 32 million customers.
  • The importance of interoperability is being increasingly recognized – in Angola, Malawi, and Zimbabwe, and in the CEMAC region, regulators have issued guidance that mandates interoperability between providers. In Ghana, which has multiple instant payment systems, a central platform has been created to ensure cross-border interoperability.

What role do central banks play in the development of real-time payments in Africa?

Central banks shape the legal and regulatory framework, strengthen governance and oversight, enable risk-managed non-bank access to payment systems and settlement facilities, and set standards for fraud prevention and dispute resolution, meaning they help create the rules, incentives, and infrastructure needed for safe instant payment settlement. When central banks are involved in governance and interoperability, instant payment systems can become more inclusive and provide shared infrastructure that enables providers to deliver low-value, instant retail payments around the clock.

Why is interoperability critical for the future of instant payments in Africa?

Africa's payments landscape is growing quickly but remains fragmented across countries, providers, infrastructure readiness, regulatory environments, and levels of digitization. Swift notes that Sub-Saharan Africa spans more than 40 countries progressing toward digitization at different rates, and that the need for an interconnected payments ecosystem has “never been greater” if the region is to grow sustainably. A siloed real-time payments network may improve speed within individual systems, but interoperable real-time payments are needed to connect banks, fintechs, mobile money operators, and payment infrastructures so that instant payments can move with less friction and broader reach.

Looking outside the continent

Learning from other regions when it comes to building inclusive, efficient, and secure payment ecosystems can help inform continued innovation across Africa. By applying global lessons, markets can accelerate new use cases and expand the impact of real-time payments. In Thailand, for example, the government has played a pivotal role in PromptPay’s popularity. The initial use case was to disburse welfare payments using a proxy, such as a mobile number or citizen ID. This increased consumer familiarity with the system, supporting broader adoption and helping expand usage into merchant payments and other services.

Other regions are also widely adopting overlay services, particularly fraud prevention tools – which can help overcome consumer confidence issues and support scaling. Mastercard launched TRACE in the Philippines in early 2025 - the first network-level solution for real-time payment systems developed to identify money mules and trace the dispersion of funds proactively.    

Thanks to innovations like TRACE, banks and fintechs are now able to collaborate with others across the ecosystem to provide more secure capabilities on a country’s real-time rails. This sense of security will be vital in giving African markets – and end users – confidence as their own real-time systems scale.”

Helen Stoner, Head of Real-Time Payment Sales, Mastercard

Real-time payments are doing more than simply making it easier to pay and get paid. They have the potential to supercharge digital economies across Africa. As additional countries embark on their real-time journeys, looking at and learning from other markets can help to guide success.

As countries overcome hurdles, and adoption and innovation continue to grow across the continent, real-time payments could become one of Africa’s most powerful tools for sustainable growth and shared prosperity.

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