ABA Editorial · Dec 27, 2025 · 13 min read
Nigeria's NIBSS Instant Payments powers over 90 percent of Nigerian interbank transfers and processed over USD 1 trillion in 2024. Kenya's PesaLink wants to be "Kenya's digital payments rail." Ghana's GhIPSS is the continental template for interoperability. Inside the switches nobody talks about but every African fintech depends on.
Every time someone writes about African fintech innovation, the names that come up are the consumer brands: M-Pesa, Flutterwave, Wave, OPay, TymeBank, MNT-Halan, Yoco. What does not come up often enough is the boring, essential infrastructure underneath them. Nigerian fintechs work because NIBSS works. Kenyan mobile money interoperates because Kenya Bankers Association built PesaLink and because the Central Bank of Kenya mandated interoperability in 2022. Ghanaian payments function as smoothly as they do because GhIPSS runs the Mobile Money Interoperability service. These are the national payment switches, and they are the rails that the visible consumer fintechs ride. This is a market report on the African national payment switch layer in 2026, how each major switch operates, and why the governance structure of each one materially shapes what kind of fintech innovation happens above it.
NIBSS, the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System, is the most successful African national payment switch by a wide margin. Its flagship product, NIBSS Instant Payments (NIP), launched in 2011 and now underpins over 90 percent of Nigerian bank-to-bank transfers. In 2024, Nigeria's instant payments infrastructure processed over USD 1 trillion in transaction value. NIBSS is owned jointly by the Central Bank of Nigeria and Nigerian commercial banks, which gives it a shareholder base representative of the payment ecosystem rather than of any single incumbent.
The NIBSS economic model is the textbook template for how a national payment switch should work. A single integration point connects every participant (banks, fintechs, payment service providers, mobile money operators). Per-transaction fees are low and fall as aggregate volume grows, creating positive-sum incentives for all participants to push volume through the shared infrastructure rather than through proprietary rails. The scale generates the trust, the trust generates the consumer usage, and the consumer usage generates the scale. It is the virtuous cycle that every African country wishes it had.
NIBSS's success is why Nigerian fintechs could scale so quickly in 2018 to 2022. Flutterwave, Paystack, Kuda, FairMoney, Carbon, and the rest did not have to build their own interbank rails. They could integrate once with NIBSS and instantly reach every Nigerian bank account and every participating wallet. Compare that to markets where each fintech has to negotiate bilateral connections with each bank, each mobile money operator, and each regional switch, and the scale difference becomes obvious.
NIBSS also runs several adjacent products that matter for the fintech ecosystem, including the Bank Verification Number (BVN) system, which is the unique identifier tied to every Nigerian bank account and serves as the foundation for KYC compliance across all fintechs operating in the country. BVN coverage is now near-universal for banked Nigerian adults, which eliminates one of the friction points that historically slowed fintech onboarding in other markets.
PesaLink, owned by the Kenya Bankers Association (KBA), is Kenya's attempt to build an equivalent to NIBSS for bank-to-bank transfers. Launched in 2017, PesaLink enables near-real-time transfers between Kenyan bank accounts, and increasingly between bank accounts and mobile money wallets. The transaction volumes are growing but remain below what NIBSS achieves in Nigeria, partly because Kenyan consumer payment behavior is already dominated by M-Pesa rather than by bank transfers.
PesaLink CEO Gituku Kirika, in a TechCabal feature published in October 2025, described the platform's ambition as becoming "Kenya's digital payments rail" comparable to India's Unified Payments Interface (UPI) or Nigeria's NIBSS Instant Payments. Kirika identified two structural challenges. First, PesaLink is less recognized by consumers than M-Pesa. Most Kenyans do not interact with PesaLink as a brand because it operates hidden behind bank apps and fintech wallets. Second, PesaLink is wholly owned by the Kenya Bankers Association, meaning the governance and shareholding reflect bank interests rather than all payment participants. "World over, the rule is that the governance, that is, the decision-making and the shareholding, should be representative of the payment participants," Kirika said. "It is something we would definitely need to look into."
Unlike India (where the National Payments Corporation of India operates UPI as a public utility with broad representation) or Nigeria (where NIBSS is jointly owned by the central bank and commercial banks), Kenya's approach has effectively separated bank rails (PesaLink) from the dominant mobile money rail (M-Pesa). The Central Bank of Kenya published a National Payments Strategy and consulted on a fast payments system, but has stopped short of mandating a single national switch. This means PesaLink has to grow by persuasion rather than by regulatory mandate, which is the harder route.
The Ghana Interbank Payment and Settlement Systems (GhIPSS) is the African national switch most often cited as the template that other countries should study. GhIPSS operates under Bank of Ghana oversight and runs multiple products including the Mobile Money Interoperability (MMI) service, the e-zwich biometric smart card system, the gh-link card scheme, and real-time payment services.
The Mobile Money Interoperability service is what made Ghana's reputation. Launched in 2018, MMI allows direct and seamless fund transfers across mobile money networks (MTN, AirtelTigo, Telecel, Vodafone) and between mobile money wallets and bank accounts. The Ghanaian regulator did not wait for operators to negotiate bilaterally. Bank of Ghana mandated the participation framework, GhIPSS built the technical infrastructure, and the Ghana Chamber of Telecommunications coordinated the operator participation. Within two years of launch, MMI was handling the majority of cross-network mobile money transfers in Ghana, and the consumer experience (a single interface that works regardless of which network the counterparty is on) became the norm.
GhIPSS is now expanding into QR-based merchant payments, which is the natural next step after interoperable peer-to-peer transfers. The goal is to give small Ghanaian merchants a single QR code that accepts any mobile money wallet, any bank card, and any fintech wallet integrated with the switch. If GhIPSS succeeds in this, Ghana becomes the first African country with a fully interoperable retail payment layer.
Beyond the three major switches, several other African national payment systems are worth tracking.
In South Africa, PayInc (formerly BankservAfrica) is the long-established national clearing and settlement operator. In November 2025, the South African Reserve Bank acquired a majority stake in PayInc and began the process of transitioning it into a National Payments Utility, the first structural overhaul of South African payment infrastructure in nearly three decades. The explicit goal is to move PayInc from a commercially-owned clearing operator into a public-interest utility providing open, shared infrastructure that any licensed participant can access on equal terms. This is the closest South Africa has come to adopting the NIBSS model.
In Egypt, the Central Bank of Egypt operates the Instant Payment Network (IPN), launched in March 2022, which connects all Egyptian banks into a unified real-time transfer system. On top of IPN, the CBE launched InstaPay, a consumer-facing smartphone application. In the second quarter of 2025, Egyptian mobile wallet transactions reached EGP 943 billion (approximately USD 19.8 billion), representing a 72 percent year-on-year increase, according to data cited in AGBI's November 2025 CIB Egypt special report.
In the WAEMU zone, the BCEAO PI-SPI interoperability switch is the central bank's new shared infrastructure for cross-border and cross-operator payments across the eight WAEMU member countries. PI-SPI is the infrastructure that Ivorian fintech Julaya, for example, is integrating with as part of its 2025 BCEAO payment institution license conditions. Whether PI-SPI delivers what it promises (WAEMU-wide interoperability for fintechs with a single license) will define the Francophone West African fintech story for the next three years.
The consistent pattern across African national payment switches is that governance matters as much as technology. Switches owned exclusively by commercial banks (PesaLink in Kenya, historically PayInc in South Africa) tend to under-optimize for fintech participation because fintechs are seen as competitors to the bank shareholders. Switches owned jointly by central banks and commercial banks (NIBSS in Nigeria) tend to do better because the regulator can force concessions on behalf of the broader ecosystem. Switches owned directly by central banks or by public utilities (CBE IPN in Egypt, the new PayInc structure in South Africa, BCEAO PI-SPI in WAEMU) tend to do best for broad-based innovation because the commercial interests of individual participants do not dominate governance decisions.
The trajectory across the continent is clearly toward more public or public-private governance of national payment infrastructure, and away from pure commercial-bank ownership. This is happening in part because regulators have learned from the NIBSS success story, and in part because the fintech industry has become politically strong enough to push for more inclusive governance of the shared rails it depends on.
Three things. First, whether South Africa's PayInc transition delivers on the promise of open, shared infrastructure, or whether the legacy commercial structure reasserts itself during implementation. The direction SARB has set is clear. The execution remains to be tested. Second, whether PesaLink manages to restructure its governance to include fintech participants, or whether Kenya eventually adopts a more centralized model under Central Bank of Kenya leadership. Third, how national payment switches integrate with PAPSS to create the "network of networks" architecture that PAPSS CEO Mike Ogbalu III has described. The national switches are the layer where most African payment volume sits, and PAPSS needs them to succeed at the continental level.
The point of this report is that the visible fintechs get the attention, but the invisible infrastructure determines what they can do. A fintech in Nigeria operates inside NIBSS's envelope. A fintech in Kenya operates inside M-Pesa's envelope (plus PesaLink's, for bank connectivity). A fintech in Ghana operates inside GhIPSS's envelope. The boundaries of each envelope shape what products are possible, what costs are achievable, and how quickly new entrants can scale. Understanding the switches is understanding the envelope.
This report draws on TechCabal's October 2025 feature on PesaLink and CEO Gituku Kirika's interview; public communications from NIBSS, GhIPSS, and the Central Bank of Egypt; the 2025 GSMA State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money; the FinASA (South African Finance Association) March 2026 ecosystem briefing on the SARB PayInc acquisition; AGBI's November 2025 CIB Egypt Special Report for InstaPay volumes; Ecofin Agency coverage of BCEAO PI-SPI and the WAEMU payment integration framework; and the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) public materials on "network of networks" architecture.