ABA Editorial · Nov 29, 2025 · 12 min read
Sub-Saharan Africa processed USD 1.4 trillion through mobile money in 2025, representing 66 percent of global transaction value. But cross-wallet transfers still cost more than they should and fragmentation persists. Inside the GSMA data, the Ghana and Kenya interoperability models, and why MTN MoMo's 14-market integration push matters.
When GSMA published its State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money 2026 in early April, the headline numbers reframed the African fintech conversation again. Globally, more than USD 2 trillion flowed through mobile money in 2025. Of that, USD 1.4 trillion was transacted in Sub-Saharan Africa alone, representing 66 percent of the global total. The region also held 347 million active 30-day mobile money accounts, nearly 60 percent of the global total of 593 million. It took the global mobile money industry 20 years to reach USD 1 trillion in annual transaction values. It took just four more years to double that, between 2021 and 2025. This is a market report on where mobile money interoperability actually stands in 2026, what still does not work, and why Ghana and Kenya have emerged as the two competing templates for the rest of the continent.
Mobile money in Africa has always been organized by network. If you hold an MTN Mobile Money wallet in Ghana, you can send money to another MTN wallet instantly and cheaply. If you need to send money to a friend who holds an AirtelTigo wallet, the historical answer was that you could not, or could but paid a large fee, or could but the transfer took hours or days to settle. For most of the 2010s, the economics of each mobile money operator depended on their wallet being a closed ecosystem. Interoperability was a threat, not an opportunity.
That posture has shifted since approximately 2020. Three forces pushed the change. First, regulators in Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, and elsewhere began pressing operators to interoperate, sometimes softly and sometimes through direct mandate. Second, new entrants like Wave in Senegal demonstrated that aggressive pricing (1 percent flat fees for withdrawals, free transfers between Wave users) could peel significant market share away from incumbents, forcing the incumbents to compete rather than rely on network lock-in. Third, the GSMA and the broader industry recognized that interoperability was the thing preventing mobile money from graduating from a retail tool to a genuine continental payment infrastructure.
Progress has been real but uneven. GSMA research cited in the 2026 State of the Industry report notes that over 60 percent of mobile money providers surveyed now believe that interoperability, KYC, and consumer protection regulations have actively supported their operations. At the same time, 24 percent of providers said cross-border data transfer regulations had hindered their operations, which is the binding constraint on the next stage of interoperability growth.
Ghana is widely cited as the African interoperability success story. The Ghana Interbank Payment and Settlement Systems (GhIPSS), operated under Bank of Ghana oversight, runs the country's Mobile Money Interoperability (MMI) service. MMI allows direct and seamless transfer of funds from one mobile money wallet to another across networks, as well as wallet-to-bank and bank-to-wallet transfers. The system is now expanding into QR-based merchant payments, which is the next frontier.
The reason the Ghana model worked is structural. It was driven top-down by GhIPSS and the Ghana Chamber of Telecommunications under clear Bank of Ghana regulatory guidance, with all major players (MTN, AirtelTigo, Telecel) participating under a shared framework. The regulator did not leave it to market negotiation between operators, which is where most African interoperability attempts have stalled. Ghana's approach has become a template that other African markets study, including Uganda, where banks formed the Agent Banking Company in 2018 to create a shared agent network now numbering over 20,000 outlets.
Kenya's interoperability story is different because of M-Pesa. Safaricom's M-Pesa is not just the largest mobile money operator in Kenya, it is the default payment infrastructure for tens of millions of Kenyans, processing the equivalent of a significant fraction of Kenyan GDP through its rails every year. That dominance means Kenyan interoperability is less about connecting competing mobile money operators (there are fewer serious challengers) and more about connecting the bank-centric rails to M-Pesa.
PesaLink, wholly owned by the Kenya Bankers Association (KBA), is the instant payment switch built to do exactly that. Launched in 2017, PesaLink enables near-real-time transfers between Kenyan bank accounts and, increasingly, between bank accounts and mobile money wallets. By 2025, PesaLink was processing a meaningful share of Kenyan interbank transfers, though it remains less recognized by consumers than M-Pesa. In a 2025 TechCabal feature, PesaLink CEO Gituku Kirika described the platform as trying to be "Kenya's digital payments rail," comparable to India's UPI or Nigeria's NIBSS Instant Payments. But he also acknowledged the challenge: unlike M-Pesa, which has built a single familiar experience for millions of users, PesaLink remains relatively unknown as a brand, hidden behind bank apps and fintech wallets. Kenya achieved full interoperability of mobile money operators in 2022, but the consumer experience remains uneven because each service provider still designs its own interface.
A structural problem Kirika highlighted is that PesaLink is wholly owned by the Kenya Bankers Association, meaning governance reflects bank shareholders rather than all payment ecosystem 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. That governance gap is the thing that separates PesaLink from India's UPI, which operates under the National Payments Corporation of India as a public utility with broad participant representation.
Nigeria's interoperability story runs through NIBSS, the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System. The NIBSS Instant Payments (NIP) platform now underpins over 90 percent of bank-to-bank transfers in Nigeria, processing over USD 1 trillion in transactions in 2024. NIBSS is a shared infrastructure owned jointly by the Central Bank of Nigeria and Nigerian commercial banks, and its economic model (single integration point for all players, per-transaction fees that fall as volume grows) is the closest African analog to India's UPI.
NIP's success is why Nigerian fintechs like Flutterwave and Paystack could scale so quickly: the underlying interbank rails were already solved. Every Nigerian bank account and most fintech wallets can send and receive money to every other account in near real time, at very low marginal cost. The interoperability challenge in Nigeria is less about domestic rails and more about connecting NIBSS to the mobile money ecosystems of neighboring countries.
The most ambitious mobile-money-led interoperability effort in 2026 is MTN MoMo's expansion across 14 MTN markets. Announced in detail at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in early 2026, MTN Group's fintech strategy (led by Group Fintech CEO Serigne Dioum) is to transform MoMo from a closed mobile wallet into an open financial ecosystem. Interoperability now spans wallet-to-wallet transfers, wallet-to-bank integrations, connections to national payment switches including GhIPSS and NIBSS, cross-border remittance rails, and merchant payment APIs. In 14 MTN markets across West, Central, East, and Southern Africa, MoMo can connect customers to banks, merchants, and partners that were previously walled off.
The strategic insight behind MTN's pivot is simple. When mobile money is the dominant form of transaction in a country (Ghana, Uganda, Rwanda), owning a wallet no longer protects margin by itself. The value shifts to being the wallet that can interoperate most widely and at the lowest cost. MTN is betting that an open posture wins more than a closed posture in 2026, and its data so far suggests the bet is correct: regular mobile money usage has increased worldwide over the past year, with active 30-day accounts rising 15 percent, and Sub-Saharan Africa drove more than two-thirds of that growth.
Despite the headline progress, three specific interoperability problems remain unresolved in 2026.
Cross-border mobile money transfers are still expensive. According to World Bank remittance price data, sending money within Africa often costs more than sending from outside Africa. In Q4 2023, fees averaged 33 percent for USD 200 remittances from Tanzania to Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda, which is absurd by any measure and the direct result of fragmented cross-border interoperability. This is where PAPSS and regional payment system integrations are expected to make the biggest difference in 2026 and 2027.
Merchant payments remain fragmented. A small merchant in Ghana who accepts MTN MoMo, AirtelTigo Money, and bank cards still typically uses three different acceptance devices or interfaces. GhIPSS is rolling out QR-based merchant payments specifically to solve this, but the coverage is uneven. In Nigeria, NIBSS-powered merchant QR is more advanced but still competes with legacy POS terminal rails.
Data portability across wallets is nearly nonexistent. A mobile money user in Kenya who builds up a transaction history with M-Pesa cannot easily port that history to a competing wallet to support better credit access. This is a structural limit on how much competition interoperability actually enables.
Three things. First, whether the BCEAO's PI-SPI interoperability switch in the WAEMU zone, rolling out through 2026, delivers the same cross-border benefits that GhIPSS delivered within Ghana. The WAEMU is eight countries sharing a currency; if payments interoperability works there, it is a template for the rest of the continent. Second, how the PAPSS network integrates with national switches to become a true "network of networks" (a phrase used by PAPSS CEO Mike Ogbalu III) rather than a parallel system. Third, whether regulators move from mandating domestic interoperability to mandating cross-border interoperability, which is politically harder but economically larger.
For now, the story for 2026 is that mobile money on the continent has reached a scale that makes interoperability a survival issue rather than a strategic one. USD 1.4 trillion does not flow through walled gardens. It flows through open networks, or it does not flow at all.
This report draws on the GSMA State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money 2026 (published early April 2026); Connecting Africa coverage of the GSMA 2026 findings; TechAfrica News reporting on the MTN MoMo interoperability expansion (March 2026); TechCabal's October 2025 feature on PesaLink and its governance structure; Tech In Africa analysis of GhIPSS and the Ghana Mobile Money Interoperability service; FurtherAfrica reporting on African payment switches (August 2025); and public communications from GhIPSS and NIBSS.