ABA Editorial · Jul 16, 2025 · 10 min read
By late 2025, the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System connected 19 countries, more than 150 commercial banks, and 14 payment switches. Two new products launched in June and July 2025, PAPSSCARD and the African Currency Marketplace, are reshaping how intra-African trade gets paid for.
For most of the last half-century, when a business in Lagos paid a supplier in Nairobi, the money did not really travel from Lagos to Nairobi. It travelled from Lagos to a correspondent bank in London or New York, was converted from naira into US dollars, sat in a hard-currency settlement account for one to five business days, was converted from dollars into Kenyan shillings, and then travelled from the correspondent bank to Nairobi. The process added fees, delays, and currency risk to every single intra-African trade transaction, and it existed because Africa had no continental payment infrastructure of its own.
The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System, PAPSS, is the infrastructure built to change that. This is a market report on where PAPSS stood at the end of 2025, what it shipped in 2025, and what the existence of a functioning Pan-African payment rail means for intra-African trade under the African Continental Free Trade Area.
PAPSS was officially launched in Accra, Ghana on 13 January 2022 by Afreximbank in collaboration with the African Union Commission and the AfCFTA Secretariat. It started as a pilot in the six countries of the West African Monetary Zone. By late 2025, according to reporting in African Business citing PAPSS data, the network had expanded to connect 19 countries across four regions, with more than 150 commercial banks and 14 payment switches integrated. The geographic coverage now includes a meaningful presence in North Africa, Morocco, Algeria, Egypt and Tunisia are all on board, alongside growing corridors in East and Southern Africa.
This is a meaningful scale. PAPSS is not yet continent-wide, 19 of 54 African countries is just over a third, but it has crossed the threshold from pilot project to operational infrastructure. The structural design is sound: PAPSS operates as a real-time gross settlement (RTGS) layer sitting above the central banks of participating countries, with Afreximbank acting as settlement agent for hard-currency positions. Transactions between two African banks in two different African countries are now routed entirely within Africa, with near-instant payment (within 120 seconds, according to PAPSS technical documentation) and daily net settlement between the participating central banks.
2025 was PAPSS's most productive year since launch. The system shipped two major new products that materially expand what the infrastructure can do.
PAPSSCARD, launched on 27 June 2025 at the 32nd Afreximbank Annual Meetings in Abuja, is the continent's first Pan-African card scheme. Developed as a joint venture between Afreximbank, PAPSS, and Mercury Payment Services, the card processes transactions entirely within Africa, keeping processing revenue, transaction data, and economic value on the continent rather than routing through Visa or Mastercard's global networks. The initial rollout includes issuing banks Bank of Kigali and I&M Bank Rwanda, with Rswitch (Rwanda's national switch) and Smart Cash / Unified Payments handling acceptance in Nigeria. John Bosco Sebabi, Acting CEO of PAPSSCARD, said at launch that the card would "reduce costs for public institutions, support innovation across the financial sector, and expand access to secure, modern payment tools."
The PAPSS African Currency Marketplace (PACM), launched on 7 July 2025 in partnership with African deep-tech firm Interstellar, addresses a different problem: the direct exchange of African currencies without routing through hard currency. PACM is designed as a peer-to-peer platform where businesses can trade currency positions in near real time while remaining compliant with national FX regulations. The platform uses permissioned blockchain technology for settlement and is aimed at eliminating what Afreximbank Executive Vice President Haytham El Maayergi called "trapped capital", money that exists on one side of an African currency boundary but cannot efficiently cross it.
The "trapped capital" problem is concrete and large. According to IATA data cited by Ecofin Agency, African countries held more than US$846 million in blocked international airline revenues at the time PACM launched, money earned by airlines selling tickets in local African currencies that they could not repatriate due to FX shortages. PACM was designed in part to provide a formal, transparent venue for resolving exactly this kind of FX bottleneck.
A regulatory moment worth noting: on 28 April 2025, the Central Bank of Nigeria issued a circular streamlining documentation requirements for PAPSS transactions. Individuals making PAPSS cross-border payments of under US$2,000 per month and corporates making payments under US$5,000 per month now need only basic KYC and AML documentation, a dramatic reduction from the paperwork-heavy Form A and related requirements that had historically applied to cross-border transactions in naira.
This matters more than it sounds. Nigeria is by population the largest potential user of PAPSS on the continent, and Nigerian businesses are among the most active intra-African traders. Reducing the paperwork friction on PAPSS transactions was the biggest single operational barrier to Nigerian SME adoption. PAPSS CEO Mike Ogbalu III called the CBN move "a transformational milestone for Nigerian commerce and for the larger vision of African economic integration" and signalled that PAPSS expected Nigerian banks to begin integrating the system into their mobile apps and digital channels in the near future.
PAPSS has the deepest institutional endorsement of any African payment infrastructure project. The African Union Heads of State and the continent's Central Bank Governors have adopted it as the official payment and settlement platform for implementing the AfCFTA. The system is governed by the PAPSS Governing Council, a College of Governors composed of central bank governors from participating countries, which provides oversight and ensures alignment with national monetary policy.
This matters because most previous attempts to build cross-border African payment infrastructure struggled with fragmented liquidity and lack of interoperability between regional systems. EAPS (East African Payment System), REPSS (COMESA's Regional Payment and Settlement System), and various sub-regional rails all existed before PAPSS. They still exist. What PAPSS provides is a "network of networks" layer that can connect regional systems and provide continental net settlement, the layer they previously lacked.
For businesses operating across African borders, PAPSS is quietly shifting what is possible. An SME in Ghana importing goods from South Africa no longer needs a USD-denominated correspondent bank relationship to settle the trade, it can pay in cedis, the South African supplier receives rands, and the net cross-border position is settled between the two central banks at the end of the day. The transaction clears in seconds rather than days. The FX cost is the midpoint of the two local currencies rather than two full round-trips through dollars.
Scaled across millions of intra-African SME transactions, this is the kind of infrastructure that materially lowers the cost of cross-border trade, which is the entire point of the AfCFTA. Intra-African trade has historically been around 15-17% of total African trade by value, compared to 60%+ intra-regional trade in Europe or Asia. A big part of the gap is the physical infrastructure (ports, roads, customs). Another big part is the financial infrastructure. PAPSS is the financial infrastructure coming online in real time.
Three things to watch on PAPSS in 2026. First, how many additional African countries go live on the network. The current 19-country footprint is concentrated in West Africa with strategic outposts in North and East; adding Central African states and deepening Southern African presence is the natural next step. Second, how PAPSSCARD uptake compares to established card networks. Keeping transaction data and processing revenue on the continent is a strategic advantage, but only if African consumers actually use the card. Third, whether PACM becomes the primary venue for resolving the "trapped capital" problem across African currencies, or whether the informal FX market continues to absorb most of the volume.
After decades of projects that promised Pan-African financial integration and delivered modest pilots, PAPSS in 2025 crossed the line into operational reality. That is a genuinely significant moment for African cross-border trade.
This report draws on PAPSS and Afreximbank press materials throughout 2025, including the PAPSSCARD launch announcement (27 June 2025), the PACM launch announcement (7 July 2025), and the Nigeria CBN policy circular of 28 April 2025; reporting by African Business ("Africa's payment revolution", November 2025); and PAPSS technical documentation on the instant payment system (PIP).