ABA Editorial · Dec 25, 2025 · 13 min read
In June and July 2025, PAPSS launched two new products: PAPSSCARD (Africa's first continental card scheme) and PAPSS African Currency Marketplace. By November 2025, PAPSS connected 17 countries, 150+ commercial banks, and 14 national switches. The system is forecast to save USD 5 billion annually in transaction costs. Inside the Afreximbank vision, the Interstellar partnership, and why Moroccan entry matters.
The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) is the most ambitious African financial infrastructure project of the last decade. Launched publicly on 13 January 2022 by the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank), the African Union, and the AfCFTA Secretariat, PAPSS was originally designed as a cross-border real-time gross settlement system that would enable payments between African countries in local currencies, bypassing the need to convert into US dollars for settlement. For the first three years, it quietly built its network. In 2025, it became something more ambitious: a full continental payment architecture with its own card scheme, its own currency exchange marketplace, and real momentum among central banks joining the network. This is a market report on where PAPSS stands in 2026, what it has actually delivered, and what it still has to prove.
Africa has 41 currencies, diverse regulatory environments, and historically very little currency convertibility between them. For decades, cross-border payments within Africa followed a routing pattern that was as expensive as it was absurd. A Kenyan company wanting to pay a Nigerian supplier would typically convert Kenyan shillings to US dollars, route the dollar payment through a correspondent bank in London or New York, and have the dollars converted to Nigerian naira at the receiving end. Every conversion charged FX fees. Every hop added settlement time. Intra-African payments commonly took several business days and cost more than cross-continental payments to Europe or North America.
The logic behind PAPSS is to eliminate the dollar routing entirely. Instead of converting through a third currency, PAPSS enables direct settlement between African central banks, with Afreximbank acting as settlement agent. An originator issues a payment instruction in their local currency to their bank or payment service provider. The instruction is sent to PAPSS through the originator country's central bank, which routes it to the beneficiary country's central bank and then to the beneficiary bank account. At the end of each day, PAPSS nets out the balance of all transactions between African currencies and central banks resolve the remaining difference in hard currency. The next day, the cycle starts again from net zero.
The economic impact projection is USD 5 billion in annual savings in payment transaction costs that were previously lost to fees for currency conversions and offshore correspondent banking routing. That USD 5 billion figure comes from Afreximbank and has been widely cited in PAPSS materials and African Business analysis.
For its first three years, PAPSS offered a single product: the PAPSS Instant Payment System (IPS), which handled the cross-border transfers described above. In 2025, PAPSS dramatically expanded the product set with two major launches at the 32nd Afreximbank Annual Meetings in Abuja.
PAPSSCARD, Africa's first continental card scheme, was unveiled on 27 June 2025. The card is a joint venture between Afreximbank, PAPSS, and Mercury Payment Services (MPS), and it enables card payments across African borders with transactions processed entirely within the continent rather than routing through Visa or Mastercard networks that send data and fees offshore. Launch partners include issuing banks Bank of Kigali and I&M Bank Rwanda, Rswitch (Rwanda's national switch), Smart Cash, and Unified Payments (providing acceptance in Nigeria). Afreximbank President Professor Benedict Oramah framed the launch in explicitly sovereign terms: "For too long, Africa's reliance on external payment systems has impeded trade, increased costs, and compromised control over our financial data. PAPSSCARD changes that." PAPSS CEO Mike Ogbalu III described it as "a powerful symbol of progress and a bold step towards financial independence."
PAPSS African Currency Marketplace (PACM), launched on 7 July 2025 in partnership with African deep-tech company Interstellar, is the more structurally significant of the two. PACM is an order-book-driven financial market infrastructure that enables direct peer-to-peer exchange of African currencies without routing through a third currency. During the pilot phase, more than 80 African corporates transacted across 12 currency pairs with all settlements in local currencies. PAPSS CEO Ogbalu described PACM as solving a problem that the original instant payment system did not: "We soon realised that solving for payments alone was not enough. We needed a way to handle the FX that sits underneath the payments."
A concrete example of how PACM works in practice: Kenya Airways earns Nigerian naira from ticket sales in Nigeria. Under the old model, Kenya Airways would have had to convert those naira to US dollars, wait for approval from Nigerian central bank FX authorities, and then convert the dollars into Kenyan shillings, with each step incurring delay and cost. Under PACM, Kenya Airways can directly exchange naira for Kenyan shillings through the marketplace. Early adopters include ZEP-RE (PTA Reinsurance Company) and Access View Africa, which PAPSS quoted as calling PACM "a dream come true."
The IATA-cited context makes clear why this matters. African countries hold the vast majority of the world's blocked airline revenues (over USD 846 million as of 2025), largely because foreign airlines cannot easily repatriate the local currency revenues they earn in African markets. PACM addresses exactly this class of problem.
By November 2025, PAPSS connected 17 countries, 150+ commercial banks, and 14 national switches. The countries currently in the network span West, East, and North Africa, with the most consequential 2025 addition being Morocco. Bank Al-Maghrib signed the PAPSS membership agreement on 7 July 2025, making Morocco the 17th country in the network. Morocco's entry matters because it connects North Africa to the sub-Saharan PAPSS network and because Moroccan banks provide a natural gateway for European-origin payment flows into the African payment system.
PAPSS also has significance beyond Africa. Several Caribbean Community (CARICOM) nations began piloting PAPSS in 2023 after Afreximbank designated the Caribbean as a "diaspora-related sixth region of Africa." Afreximbank opened an office in Barbados and has been rolling out the Caribbean-Africa integration framework, with the goal of making PAPSS the settlement layer for trade between the two regions.
PAPSS is explicitly designed to coexist with, rather than replace, regional payment systems like the East African Payment System (EAPS) and COMESA's Regional Payment and Settlement System (REPSS). Historically, these regional systems have struggled with adoption because of fragmented liquidity and lack of interoperability between them. PAPSS CEO Ogbalu has described PAPSS as a "network of networks" that connects the regional systems and provides the final continental net settlement layer they previously lacked.
This approach is structurally similar to how the Bank for International Settlements describes multilateral payment platforms in its 2024 report with the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures (CPMI), "Exploring multilateral platforms for cross-border payments." The BIS-CPMI report notes that successful multilateral platforms require strong regulatory support and active participant engagement. PAPSS has achieved both, which distinguishes it from earlier attempts at African regional payment integration that had regulatory buy-in but weak commercial participation, or commercial interest but weak regulatory coordination.
PAPSS is governed by the PAPSS Bye-Laws, which put the PAPSS Scheme Rules and technical standards into operational force. The PAPSS Governing Council (PGC) provides oversight and regulation, while the PAPSS Management Board handles strategy, financial management, and stakeholder relations. PAPSS CEO Mike Ogbalu III leads the management team. John Bosco Sebabi, former World Bank consultant on African payment platforms, serves as Deputy Chief Executive and as Acting CEO of the PAPSSCARD joint venture.
The political framing around PAPSS is unusually explicit. Afreximbank and Ogbalu have consistently described the system as a tool for African "financial sovereignty," reclaiming control over payment data and value flows that previously accrued to non-African payment networks. This framing has been effective at mobilizing support from African central banks, finance ministries, and national switches. It has also attracted some caution from observers who note that PAPSS success ultimately depends on operational reliability and commercial economics, not only on political alignment.
Three things. First, the transition of Afreximbank leadership. Professor Benedict Oramah has been the single most important champion of PAPSS, and his term as Afreximbank President is scheduled to end. Whether the incoming Afreximbank president maintains PAPSS as a top institutional priority will significantly shape the system's trajectory. Second, the pace at which additional countries join the network. Major holdouts include South Africa (whose national payment infrastructure is more sophisticated than most African countries and whose SARB has been cautious about connecting to regional systems) and several francophone countries that have been waiting on BCEAO-level coordination. Third, whether PACM actually scales beyond the 80-corporate pilot. The technical architecture works. The commercial adoption question is whether major African exporters and importers choose to clear through PACM as a default or continue to use existing correspondent banking for larger flows.
The longer-term assessment is that PAPSS is real infrastructure, not aspirational diplomacy. The products launched in 2025 (PAPSSCARD and PACM) are operational. The country network is growing. The governance is stable. The economics, if they work as projected, are significant. For the first time in African payment history, there is a credible path to a unified continental settlement layer. Whether that path gets completed in 2026, 2028, or 2030 is the open question. But the direction of travel is clearer than it has ever been.
This report draws on PAPSS and Afreximbank press releases for the PAPSSCARD launch (30 June 2025), the PACM launch (7 July 2025), and Morocco's entry (7 July 2025); African Business magazine coverage of the PAPSS network expansion (November 2025); Nairametrics reporting on PAPSS products and the USD 5 billion annual savings forecast; the PAPSS website (papss.com) for network statistics and governance details; the Wikipedia entry for the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System for historical chronology; and the Bank for International Settlements and Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures 2024 report "Exploring multilateral platforms for cross-border payments."