This is the first in a three-part series about how three different types of rails are being rebuilt across Africa at the same time. That trio of rails are: the payments rail, the trade rail and the identity rail.
Each is being constructed independently of the other, but we see massive value in how they will all converge.
In the last quarter, a handful of headlines came to our attention that may have seemed unrelated. These headlines were filed separately, but we contend there is a clear pattern emerging:
It would be easy to simply file these as a trend that reveals how Africa’s payments space is “heating up”; but there’s a deeper shape forming. The payments rail across Africa is not being upgraded brick by brick but is being replaced on three tracks at once: instant domestic, instant cross-border and a settlement layer.
It’s happening in concert, not in sequence. Vendors who treat these as three separate go-to-market problems will lose to the vendors who see a single stack. That is the argument. Here is why we think so.
Let’s start with what is now the bare minimum, because it has stopped being the differentiator it once was. In South Africa, PayInc has expanded the instant payments network, and PayShap has moved past its original peer-to-peer remit toward broader commercial use, pushing into merchant payments, e-commerce and everyday retail transactions.
In Burundi, a real-time payments platform has launched with World Bank backing. In Kenya, the race to build a national payments switch is on, with the usual names like Kenswitch and Visa being close to the scene.
These all appear as national infrastructure stories, but they present a threshold. What we once considered the base rail — real-time, account-to-account, always-on domestic payment — is no longer the thing a country is trying to acquire.
It is now assumed. And once the base rail is assumed, the commercial question becomes, “what sits on top of the instant rail?”
Vendors still pitching the existence of instant payments as their value are selling the bare minimum to buyers who are already looking for the next thing.
Another important track we see is where the mispricing is most acute. For example, Thunes, the Singapore-based cross-border payments network, has published an interoperability index that now puts Kenya and Nigeria at the head of the African field, alongside South Africa and Egypt, as the continent’s only entrants in the global top fifty. Other markets are coming alive too:
In the past, a whole generation of vendors built businesses to absorb the complexity of moving money across African borders. Now, we see this complexity being engineered out, corridor by corridor, faster than most pricing models assume. Pricing compression surely follows.
In this space, if interoperability is compressing this quickly, a vendor whose value proposition rests on manual reconciliation, correspondent-banking workarounds, or a cumbersome FX layer is charging for friction that is being removed from underneath them.
The ability to confidently say, “we handle the hard part of cross-border” ebbs away every quarter because this once-hard part keeps getting easier.
The uncomfortable question is not whether that friction disappears. It is how much of your current pricing depends on it still being there.
If we think of another track, it would be the settlement layer. There are some who still think it’s an interesting proposition whose time is very far off.
Recently, Grey, the Nigerian-founded cross-border payments company, processed more than sixty million dollars in total payment volume on its new business platform in four months, with USDC and USDT making up the single largest share of that flow, per BitKE. The IMF has even recognised Nigeria’s stablecoin adoption as an emerging cross-border channel, finding that Nigeria accounts for sixty percent of stablecoin inflows into Africa since 2019.
In more examples of its increasing rise:
Stablecoins have already become the settlement layer for a meaningful slice of intra-African and Africa-outbound flow, all this while much of the vendor market is still treating them as a treasury curiosity.
Now, the regulatory conversation is catching up too. Luno’s recent public warning — that South Africa’s draft Capital Flow Management Regulations could bar local businesses from using stablecoins for cross-border payments and repatriation, locking them out of a market that settled some thirty-three trillion dollars in 2025 — speaks to this. Regulators do not draft rules for things that are not moving volume.
When the settlement layer is real enough to regulate, it is real enough to build against.
Combine these three tracks, and the implication for how you go to market is sharper than any single deal suggests. Three questions are worth asking before your next planning cycle, and they may be uncomfortable:
None of this is happening in isolation, and that is what many vendors are not fully accounting for. The payments rail is being rebuilt at the same time as the trade rail: the corridors, the settlement agreements, the commercial flows that payments actually carry.
The shape of one determines what the other can carry. An instant, interoperable, stablecoin-settled payments rail is only as valuable as the trade it moves, and the trade rail is being re-laid on its own timeline, with its own logic.
That coupling is the thread through this series. If you only read this piece, you’ll have a sharper view of where payments is going. But if you read it alongside our next piece, you’ll start to see why the two rebuilds cannot be planned separately.
Coming up next: we look at the trade rail, and why these two rebuilds are far more tightly connected than most vendors are pricing in.
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