The State of Cross-Border Payments in Africa (2026)

Ask anyone who has paid a supplier in a neighbouring country, or sent school fees to a sibling studying across the border, and you will hear the same story. It takes too long, it costs too much, and it is hard to know in advance how much will actually arrive.

This is not a niche problem. Cross-border payments are how families support each other, how traders restock, how freelancers get paid and how a continent of 54 countries trades with itself. This article looks at where things stand in 2026: why moving money across African borders is still so hard, what is changing, and what we are building at Sente.

The cost problem

The World Bank has tracked the price of sending money across borders for more than fifteen years in its Remittance Prices Worldwide database. Year after year, Sub-Saharan Africa comes out as the most expensive region in the world to send money to, with an average cost of around 8% of the amount sent. Some corridors within the continent cost far more than that.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals set a target to bring remittance costs below 3% by 2030, and to eliminate corridors where they exceed 5%. Most African corridors are still a long way from either.

For a family, that is the difference between an extra week of groceries and a fee. For a small business paying suppliers every week, it is a tax on growth that larger competitors with banking relationships don't pay.

Why it costs so much

Several problems compound one another.

Money takes the long way round

Historically, a payment from one African country to another often did not travel directly. It was converted into US dollars or euros, passed through correspondent banks in New York, London or Paris, and converted again on the other side. Every hop added a fee, a delay and an exchange-rate margin. The shape of that network is a legacy of how banking systems were built, not of where money actually needs to go.

Two conversions instead of one

Routing through a third currency means paying for two foreign-exchange conversions, each with its own spread. Exchange-rate margins are often the largest part of the cost, and the least visible: a payment advertised as "low fee" can still lose several per cent in the rate.

Fragmented rails

Most people in Africa hold money in mobile wallets, not bank accounts — and mobile-money networks were built country by country, operator by operator. A wallet on one network often cannot pay a wallet on another network in the same country without going through cash, let alone one in another country.

Compliance done many times over

Every institution in a payment chain has to know who is paying whom and screen for sanctions and fraud. When a payment passes through four institutions, those checks — and their costs — happen four times. When the checks disagree or a name doesn't match, the payment stops and waits for a human.

Uncertainty

Senders often don't know the final amount the recipient will get, or when. Recipients may be charged again on arrival. That uncertainty has its own cost: people send more than they need to, or send through informal channels they trust more, even though those carry their own risks.

What is changing

The good news is that the picture is moving, faster in the last few years than in the previous twenty.

Instant payment systems at home

More African countries now run domestic instant payment systems that connect banks and, increasingly, mobile-money operators. When money can move instantly and cheaply between institutions inside a country, the first and last legs of a cross-border payment get much easier.

Pan-African settlement

The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), launched in January 2022 by Afreximbank together with the African Continental Free Trade Area Secretariat, lets participating institutions settle cross-border payments in local currencies, without first converting through a third currency. The number of connected central banks and commercial banks has grown steadily since launch.

Free trade with a payment layer

The African Continental Free Trade Area, trading since 2021, aims to make Africa a single market. Trade between African countries is still a small share of the continent's total trade, and payments are one of the frictions holding it back. Connected payment rails are as much a part of free trade as lower tariffs.

Stablecoins and digital assets

Dollar-backed stablecoins such as USDT have become a practical tool for many businesses, especially freelancers and importers paid in dollars. Used carefully — inside a regulated platform, with proper identity checks and a clear path back into local currency — they can shorten settlement and reduce exposure to the long correspondent chain.

Shared messaging standards

ISO 20022, the global standard for payment messages, carries far richer information than older formats: structured names, addresses, purposes and references. That richer data means fewer payments stopped for manual review, and better screening when they are.

What Sente is doing

Sente is a payments platform built to make cross-border money movement in Africa cheap, fast and predictable. Here is how.

Local rails first

We connect directly to mobile-money networks such as M-PESA, MTN MoMo, Airtel Money and Orange Money, to bank transfer systems, and to card schemes — country by country. Where we can pay out on a local rail, we do, instead of routing through a correspondent bank abroad.

One conversion, quoted and locked

When a payment crosses currencies, we quote the exchange rate before you confirm, and lock it for that payment. You see exactly what the recipient will get, in their currency, before any money moves. The rate you see is the rate that is applied.

One ledger, one record

Every leg of a cross-border payment — the debit in one currency, the credit in another, our fee — is posted to a single double-entry ledger. Different currencies are never added together; conversion is always an explicit step with a recorded rate. That makes every cross-border payment traceable end to end, which matters to customers, to partners and to regulators.

Compliance once, done properly

Every payment is screened against sanctions lists, scored for fraud and checked against the rules of the countries involved, including travel-rule thresholds for larger transfers. Personal data is tokenised and kept in-region, in line with local data-protection laws, before anything reaches the shared ledger. Doing this properly once, at the platform level, is cheaper and safer than doing it partially at every hop.

Pan-African settlement and digital assets

PAPSS and stablecoin rails sit alongside the local networks as ways to settle between countries. Because every rail is connected to the platform the same way, a corridor can move to a cheaper or faster route as new rails come online — without anything changing for the person sending the money.

Our goal: below 1%

Connecting the rails directly, converting once at a transparent rate and doing compliance once instead of many times removes most of the cost in a cross-border payment. That is why our goal is to bring the cost of moving money below 1% — well under both today's averages and the 3% global target.

It is a goal, not a price on offer today, and getting there will take more corridors, more partners and more volume. But the direction is clear, the building blocks now exist, and every corridor we connect brings it closer.

If you run a business that moves money across African borders, or an institution that wants to connect its rail to the rest of the continent, we'd like to hear from you.