Four years after its launch, the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System — better known as PAPSS — has built some genuinely impressive numbers. 30 African countries. 24 central banks. Around 200 financial institutions. More than 16 payment switches. The infrastructure is there. The harder question is whether it is actually being used.
PAPSS went live in January 2022, backed by the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) in partnership with the African Union and the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). The pitch was straightforward: African countries needed a payment system that could move money between them without routing every transaction through New York, London, or Frankfurt first.
Seven Seconds vs. Five Days
The performance numbers PAPSS is citing are striking. Cross-border payments that used to take three to five business days to clear are now settling in an average of seven seconds — well within the 120-second guarantee the system was designed to meet. PAPSS also claims it is cut the cost of cross-border transfers by as much as 95%, with transaction volumes growing more than 1,000% over the past year.
Those figures matter because the baseline was so bad. Intra-African trade accounted for just 14.4% of Africa's total trade in 2024 — a figure that has long embarrassed a continent supposedly benefiting from the AfCFTA. Meanwhile, Sub-Saharan Africa remained the most expensive region in the world for sending remittances, with the average cost hitting 8.45% in Q1 2025, according to available data.
How the Settlement Model Actually Works
At the core of PAPSS's design is what it calls multilateral net settlement. Instead of settling each individual transaction between two countries, the system nets the flows in both directions and moves only the difference.
"If $10 million worth of transactions is going into Ghana, and $9 million is going from Ghana into Nigeria, our system says that only the $1 million equivalent is what will change hands," — Mike Ogbalu III, CEO of PAPSS, speaking at a media briefing in Lagos on September 7.
Ogbalu added that between 80% and 90% of that net balance is currently being settled in local currencies, depending on the corridor and how deeply adopted PAPSS is in each market. That last caveat is doing a lot of work — adoption levels vary significantly across the countries connected to the network.
The system also eliminates the need to convert local currencies into dollars or euros before settling in the recipient's local currency — a process that traditionally inflated costs and introduced exchange rate risk. For businesses on the continent trying to trade in naira, cedis, or birr, that is not a small thing.
The Currency Marketplace Play
In 2025, PAPSS took an additional step by launching the Pan-African Currency Marketplace (PACM), developed in collaboration with African deep-tech company Interstellar. The PACM operates as a direct currency matching system, enabling African currencies to be exchanged at prevailing in-country rates — think Nigerian naira to Ethiopian birr — without passing through a third currency.
Ogbalu framed this as a direct response to the continent's fragmented currency environment and the limited convertibility that has historically made intra-African trade more expensive than trading with Europe or Asia. You can follow how currency infrastructure like this intersects with broader African fintech innovation to understand why PACM drew attention well beyond payments circles.
Infrastructure vs. Adoption
Here is where the story gets complicated. A payment network can exist in a country — and technically be connected to dozens of central banks — without ever becoming part of how real businesses and consumers actually move money day to day.
PAPSS's operational model depends on buy-in at multiple levels: central banks have to enable the rails, commercial banks have to integrate them, and fintechs and payment providers have to build products on top. That chain is long, and regulatory environments across 30 countries are far from uniform. Some markets have tighter foreign exchange controls, others have slower central bank onboarding timelines, and not every country has the same urgency around enabling regional trade flows.
The 1,000% volume growth sounds dramatic, but without an absolute baseline figure, it is hard to know whether PAPSS has crossed from pilot-scale into genuine economic infrastructure. The platform's growing network numbers tell one story; transaction value as a share of total intra-African trade would tell a much more complete one.
What is not in doubt is that the problem PAPSS is trying to solve is real, and the technical architecture it is built to address it is more sophisticated than most people outside the payments industry realise. Whether regulatory momentum across the continent can keep pace with the engineering is the question that will define its next four years.