As Africa aspires to deepen regional integration and boost intra-continental trade, one critical enabler often overlooked is the modernization of cross-border payment systems. While progress is being made through initiatives like the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), Africa can accelerate its journey by learning from the Asia-Pacific region, which has become a global frontrunner in building fast, inclusive, and interoperable cross-border payment rails.
1. Build on Strong Domestic Payment Foundations
Asia’s Approach:
Countries like India (with UPI), Thailand (PromptPay), and Singapore (PayNow) built efficient, low-cost domestic payment systems before extending them across borders.
Lesson for Africa:
Africa must strengthen its domestic real-time payment systems and ensure that each country has a strong digital financial services backbone. Interlinking weak or fragmented systems will only compound inefficiencies.
Action Point: African central banks should prioritize modernizing domestic payment infrastructure, ensuring real-time capabilities, open APIs, and wide agent networks.
2. Regional Integration Must Start with Bilateral Trust
Asia’s Approach:
Thailand and Singapore began with bilateral payment linkages, using mobile numbers and QR codes. These early wins built momentum for wider multilateral connections like the ASEAN Payment Connectivity (APC) framework.
Lesson for Africa:
Start small. Africa’s regional economic communities (e.g., ECOWAS, SADC, EAC) can implement bilateral or sub-regional payment corridors that gradually expand into a pan-African network.
Action Point: Leverage trusted relationships between neighboring central banks to pilot cross-border use cases with high demand (e.g., remittances, trade settlements).
3. Adopt and Enforce Messaging Standards
Asia’s Approach:
ISO 20022 is fast becoming the global standard in Asia-Pacific, ensuring seamless communication between different systems and reducing manual reconciliation.
Lesson for Africa:
Adopting harmonized messaging standards is essential for interoperability. Fragmented data formats increase costs and processing times.
Action Point: All African payment systems should transition to ISO 20022 and enforce compliance for participating financial institutions.
4. Put the User First: Simplicity, Trust, and Accessibility
Asia’s Approach:
Asia’s innovations emphasize UX design, language localization, low transaction costs, and integration with digital identity systems. This has enhanced user adoption, even in informal or rural markets.
Lesson for Africa:
Technology alone doesn’t drive adoption. Trust and usability do. African solutions must cater to the realities of the informal economy, linguistic diversity, and low digital literacy.
Action Point: Design inclusive, multilingual payment interfaces and integrate with national digital ID schemes to ease onboarding.
5. Align Regulation and Encourage Collaboration
Asia’s Approach:
Collaborative policy harmonization on AML/KYC norms, data privacy, and currency conversion rules has enabled smoother cross-border experiences.
Lesson for Africa:
Africa must move beyond political declarations and harmonize fintech regulations, consumer protections, and dispute resolution protocols across borders.
Action Point: Empower the African Union, AfCFTA Secretariat, and the Association of African Central Banks to lead regulatory alignment initiatives.
6. Champion Success Stories to Build Momentum
Asia’s Approach:
Initiatives like the Singapore-Thailand linkage are publicly celebrated and well-documented, encouraging replication.
Lesson for Africa:
Africa must document and amplify local success stories (e.g., M-Pesa cross-border use, PAPSS pilot use cases) to inspire confidence and investment.
Action Point: Create a centralized knowledge repository for African digital payment case studies, with support from DFIs and fintech hubs.
Conclusion: A Call for Pragmatic Pan-Africanism
Cross-border payment rails are not just about technology — they’re about enabling economic opportunity, trade growth, and financial inclusion. Asia’s experience shows that success lies in pragmatic, step-by-step collaboration, not grand but impractical visions.
Africa stands on the cusp of a fintech revolution. By learning from Asia’s disciplined, user-focused, and interoperable approach, the continent can transform cross-border payments from a friction point into a catalyst for continental prosperity.
