“We see PAPSS as both an enabler and facilitator of intra-African trade,” says MFS Africa’s founder and chief executive Dare Okoudjou. “Its ability to allow both the buyer and seller of the trade transaction to pay and receive in their national currencies is a game-changer.”
Africa’s payments architecture is highly fragmented, with dispersed systems, regulations and infrastructure. That makes it harder to send and receive digital payments. PAPSS, backed by Afreximbank and the African Union, aims to harmonize inter-Africa payments and lower the cost of transactions, with a potential saving for Africa of $5bn per year.
MFS Africa, which joined PAPSS this month, runs a digital payments network across 37 African countries. It hopes that it will be able to plug an ecosystem of 320m mobile money wallets into the PAPSS platform. The company’s partners include mobile money networks such as MTN,
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