West Africa mobile‑money shift
A BISI report says mobile‑money in West Africa is evolving beyond domestic transfers toward trade finance and cross‑border integration in support of AfCFTA goals. The analysis suggests local‑currency cross‑border flows could reduce reliance on correspondent banking but also flags regulatory, cyber and stability hurdles. (bisi.org.uk)
Mobile money in West Africa is moving from phone-to-phone transfers into cross-border payments and trade finance, according to a report published April 14 by the Bloomsbury Intelligence and Security Institute. (bisi.org.uk) The report says West Africa processed about $498 billion in mobile-money transactions in 2025 and had more than 517 million registered accounts. It points to MTN MoMo and Orange Money as examples of platforms adding savings, credit, merchant payments and early trade-related services. (bisi.org.uk) Globally, mobile money processed more than $2 trillion in 2025, with 2.3 billion registered accounts and 593 million active 30-day accounts, according to the Global System for Mobile Communications Association. The same report says merchant payments reached $155 billion in 2025, the fastest-growing use case. (gsma.com) Cross-border mobile money is basically a phone wallet sending value across a frontier without routing the payment through a United States dollar leg first. The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System says its network lets participants send in local currency, complete compliance checks inside the system, and process near-instant payments within 120 seconds. (papss.com) That matters in West Africa because small traders often face high fees, delays and extra foreign-exchange steps when they pay suppliers in neighboring countries. The BISI report says local-currency settlement could cut reliance on correspondent banking and support the African Continental Free Trade Area’s push for more intra-African trade. (bisi.org.uk) One concrete test is already running between Nigeria and Ghana. Onafriq said on February 2, 2026 that it had partnered with the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System to pilot the continent’s first wallet-based outbound payments from Nigeria to Ghana, fully in naira and without hard-currency conversion. (onafriq.com) The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System was launched in January 2022 and is backed by the African Export-Import Bank, the African Union and the African Continental Free Trade Area secretariat. Its model uses pre-funded accounts and daily net settlement between participating central banks. (papss.com 1) (papss.com 2) The BISI report says the next barrier is not consumer demand but rule-making across the Economic Community of West African States. It flags differences in licensing, consumer protection and data-localization rules across 12 member states as obstacles to a seamless regional payment market. (bisi.org.uk) The Global System for Mobile Communications Association makes a similar point at the industry level. Its 2026 report says mobile money’s next phase depends on interoperability, cross-border harmonization, consumer protection and stronger fraud controls. (gsma.com) The upside is faster local-currency trade for small and medium-sized businesses; the risk is that payment rails scale faster than supervision, liquidity management and cyber defenses. West Africa’s mobile-money story is no longer just about sending cash home by phone. (bisi.org.uk)
