A continent in motion
When the dust settles on 2026, Africa will have processed more than $40 billion in digital payments. That figure is remarkable not just in absolute terms but in trajectory: five years ago, many of the rails that carry these transactions did not exist. Today they underpin everything from cross-border trade to the corner-shop transfer.
The growth is driven by three converging forces: smartphone penetration surpassing 65% of the adult population, regulatory frameworks that increasingly favor interoperability, and a generation of consumers who expect instant, mobile-first financial services.
Mobile money: the backbone of financial inclusion
Mobile money remains the dominant payment method across Sub-Saharan Africa. M-Pesa celebrated its 18th anniversary this year, but the landscape looks nothing like 2008. There are now over 800 million registered mobile money accounts continent-wide, with monthly transaction volumes exceeding $80 billion according to the GSMA State of the Industry Report.
Nigeria's mobile money story is particularly interesting. The Central Bank of Nigeria licensed Payment Service Banks (PSBs) in 2022, and by 2026 they have collectively onboarded more than 45 million wallets. OPay, PalmPay, and Moniepoint now process a combined daily volume that rivals traditional bank transfers.
The question is no longer whether Africa will go digital. It is whether the infrastructure can keep pace with the demand.
Real-time payment rails go continental
Nigeria's NIP (NIBSS Instant Payment) has been a success story for years, but 2026 marks the expansion of real-time settlement across the continent. Kenya's PesaLink, Ghana's GhIPSS Instant Pay, and South Africa's PayShap are now fully operational. The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), launched by Afreximbank, is connecting these domestic systems into a cross-border network.
For businesses, this means settlement times measured in seconds rather than days. For payment service providers like Crezaro, it means building integrations that can handle the throughput and complexity of multiple real-time systems simultaneously.
- Nigeria NIP: ~$2.3 billion daily volume, 99.7% uptime
- Kenya PesaLink: 14 million monthly transactions
- Ghana GhIPSS: 340% growth in instant transfers year-over-year
- PAPSS: Now live in 15 countries, processing $1.2 billion monthly in intra-African trade
Regulation: maturing, not constraining
The regulatory environment across Africa is maturing rapidly. Nigeria's BOFIA Act, Kenya's National Payment System Regulations, and South Africa's FSCA framework are providing clearer rules for payment operators. The trend is toward open banking mandates, standardized API specifications, and data protection regulations modeled on GDPR principles.
Ghana's central bank became the first in Africa to publish a formal open banking framework in late 2025, and Nigeria's CBN followed with draft guidelines in early 2026. These frameworks will create new opportunities for PSPs to build products on top of bank-held data, with customer consent.
Where Crezaro fits in
We built Crezaro because we saw the gap between the infrastructure that African businesses need and what was available. Existing solutions were either too expensive, too unreliable, or too narrowly focused on a single market. Our platform is designed to handle the complexity of multi-country, multi-currency, multi-rail payments from a single API.
In the coming months, we will be rolling out direct integrations with PAPSS, expanding our mobile money coverage to eight additional markets, and launching our open banking connectors for Nigeria and Ghana. The opportunity is enormous, and we are just getting started.
If you are building a business that moves money in Africa, we would love to talk. Get in touch or explore our API documentation.