Fintech firms target Africa's fragmented cross-border payments market

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Despite billions of digital transactions across Africa, businesses still struggle to move money between countries as payment networks operate largely in isolation.

The continent processed 64 billion instant payment transactions worth nearly Sh257.3 trillion (US$1.98 trillion) in 2024, according to the AfricaNenda Foundation’s State of Inclusive Instant Payment Systems (SIIPS) 2025 report.

By June 2025, Africa had 36 live instant payment systems across 31 countries.

Yet only 11 supported cross-border transactions, exposing a gap between the growth of digital payments within national borders and the ability to move money across the continent.

For businesses trading across African markets, this fragmentation can mean dealing with different payment providers, settlement processes, currencies and regulatory requirements.

A company receiving money from customers in several countries may have to navigate separate systems before it can access and reconcile those funds.

Kenya’s partnership between PesaLink and the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) illustrates efforts to address the problem.

 Announced in February 2026, the arrangement connects more than 80 Kenyan banks, fintech firms, savings and credit cooperatives and telecommunications companies on the PesaLink network to more than 160 banks and fintechs on PAPSS.

The partnership enables instant, 24-hour cross-border payments from PAPSS participants into banks and mobile money operators connected to PesaLink, with settlement in local currencies.

It is intended to reduce reliance on correspondent banking arrangements and foreign reserve currencies.

The connection does not mean every African payment network is now interoperable.

Rather, it shows how national payment systems can link to regional infrastructure to make cross-border transactions easier for businesses and individuals.

The gap is creating opportunities for fintech firms that provide payment infrastructure across multiple markets, connecting banks, mobile money operators and businesses that would otherwise rely on separate systems.

One example is Cellulant, whose Tingg platform brings together payment collections, payouts and reconciliation for businesses operating across African markets.

The company says it processes 4.5 million transactions daily across 24 African markets. It also reports connections to more than 120 banks, 47 mobile network operators and over 600 enterprise merchants.

For years, the tax on doing business across Africa has not been a lack of customers or capital but the cost and complexity of moving money between markets.

Africa's payment landscape is structurally, legally and technically different from one market to another.

A business operating in Dakar, Nairobi and Lusaka must navigate different central bank frameworks, payment channels and settlement requirements.

Cellulant says its platform addresses some of these barriers by linking global enterprise brands and local merchants to customers through mobile money systems, bank networks, digital wallets and cross-border payment channels.

“We are a merchant-centric payments business,” said Cellulant Chief Product and Technology Officer Michael Muriuki.

“We remove the need to integrate separately with multiple payment systems, enabling seamless collections and payouts for businesses operating within and across Africa's borders.”

Rather than building separate connections with every bank or mobile money provider, merchants can use payment platforms that aggregate different channels through a single integration.

However, the ability to connect payment providers does not remove differences in national regulations, currency conversion requirements or settlement arrangements.

 Fintech firms must still work within the rules and infrastructure of each market they serve.

Cellulant says it has expanded its business scale threefold in one year while improving the availability and speed of its systems. The company reports that platform uptime rose from 99.90 per cent to more than 99.98 per cent, reducing annual downtime from about nine hours to less than two.

It also says latency on key workloads fell from three seconds to under 20 milliseconds, while critical services recorded 99.99 per cent availability. These are company-reported performance figures and reflect the technical demands of processing high volumes of payments across different markets.

About 95 per cent of Cellulant’s computing capacity runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS), according to the company.

It uses cloud infrastructure services, including Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, to run and scale its systems.

“The biggest impact of migrating to AWS is the speed of experimentation,” Muriuki observed. “We can now adopt new technologies, instance types and services without long procurement or provisioning cycles.”

AWS General Manager for Sub-Saharan Africa Jyoti Ball said the cloud infrastructure had given Cellulant room to test and develop services without the cost of building and maintaining its own computing capacity.

“What excites me about our customers in Africa is how they harness the speed AWS provides to leapfrog,” Ball noted.

“Cellulant experimented their way to solutions purpose-built for their customers and AWS gave them the freedom to experiment, fail fast, learn and iterate without the burden of heavy upfront investment. That speed of iteration is their competitive edge.”

The company is also exploring artificial intelligence applications in areas such as fraud detection, merchant intelligence and credit scoring.

These applications could help payment providers identify suspicious transactions and use transaction data to assess business activity.

Muriuki said the next stage of development would focus on improving the experience for merchants using digital payment platforms.

“Aggregation is largely solved,” he explained. “The real opportunity is improving the user experience layer. We are now focused on using data, AI and local market context to make payments invisible and seamless for merchants. We are building the next layer, not just payments, but the infrastructure that makes commerce work.”

AWS is also positioning its artificial intelligence tools as part of that shift. Ball said Amazon Quick brings together business intelligence, productivity and automation tools for Cellulant.

“With Amazon Quick, Cellulant gains a unified AI-powered platform that brings together productivity, business intelligence and automation, helping their teams move faster while maintaining the rigorous standards their customers expect,” Ball added.

Muriuki said the company's ambition was to make payment processing less of a burden for businesses operating across the continent.

“Our goal is to make payments the easiest part of doing business in Africa,” he said.

The opportunity extends beyond payment processing. A March 2026 report by Boston Consulting Group projected that African fintech revenues could grow 13-fold to Sh8.45 trillion (US$65 billion) by 2030.

It identifies interoperable payment infrastructure, business-to-business transactions and wider access to credit as areas that could support the next phase of growth.

For Kenyan businesses, the potential gains lie in reducing the time and complexity involved in receiving payments from customers and partners across the region.

Local-currency settlement could also reduce dependence on conversions through major foreign currencies, although the actual cost will depend on the fees and exchange rates applied by participating providers.

The challenge is to turn separate national payment networks into infrastructure that works across borders without adding layers of cost or complexity.

As more businesses trade across African markets, competition among fintech firms will depend not only on transaction volumes but on how reliably and affordably they connect those markets.