Over the past decade, the share of adults using digital payments in Sub-Saharan Africa has nearly doubled, from around one-quarter to one-half, according to the World Bank’s Global Findex 2025. Central bank-led national financial inclusion strategies have helped drive that growth, in part by enabling market participation by nonbank payment service providers, especially mobile money operators. In many markets, these new providers are reaching people who previously found financial services too expensive to use or too far away to access. However, these providers can face scale and sustainability challenges if they lack access to payment infrastructure.
Central banks and other stakeholders are looking to instant payment systems (IPS) to overcome these market constraints. These national‑scale systems provide the shared infrastructure that allows any payment service provider (PSP) to connect and deliver low-value, instant retail payments to their end users 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year. When IPS support a wide range of payment use cases, are accessible to all PSPs in a market, enable interoperable payments among those PSPs, and have the central bank involved in governance, these systems become inclusive IPS.
Though not every country in Africa has a domestic IPS, and few IPS are inclusive, that is changing, according to The State of Inclusive Instant Payment Systems (SIIPS) in Africa 2025 report by AfricaNenda Foundation. This article summarizes the current state of the IPS landscape in Africa, the degree of inclusivity, the role of central banks in expanding IPS access, and the critical gaps that remain.
The 2025 IPS Landscape Included 36 Systems
As of June 2025, there were 33 domestic IPS across 25 countries in Africa, and three cross-border systems, for a total of 36 systems. This represents an increase from 31 domestic systems as of June 2024.[1]
African IPS have gravitated in recent years toward the “cross‑domain” type, which allow bank and nonbank PSPs to participate. Cross-domain IPS differ from bank IPS, which only allow bank participation, mobile money IPS, which allow only mobile money operators, and sovereign digital currency IPS, which transact in central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). Of the 33 live domestic IPS in Africa, 16 are cross-domain. Mobile money IPS are the next most common type, with 10 systems adhering to this model, followed by bank IPS (6), and sovereign digital currency IPS (1). Seven countries have multiple live IPS of different types, including Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, South Africa, and Tanzania.
In addition to domestic systems, there are three active regional IPS: GIMACPAY in the Economic and Monetary Community of Central Africa (CEMAC), the Pan‑African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), which aspires to be pan‑continental, and Transactions Cleared on an Immediate Basis (TCIB) in the Southern African Development Community (SADC). These regional systems provide regional functionality to 22 countries.
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[1] The data collection for SIIPS 2025 included a survey of central banks and IPS operators, supplemented by stakeholder and expert interviews, desktop research, and first-hand experience with some of the systems; 11 IPS operators and 13 central banks provided data.
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