Bypassing the Dollar: Inside Africa’s $329 Billion Cross-Border Payments Shake-Up

For decades, a simple rule defined African trade:

If a Kenyan company wanted to pay a supplier in Zambia, or a Ghanaian importer needed to settle a bill in Rwanda, the money went on a long, expensive detour through the U.S. dollar and a chain of foreign correspondent banks.

In 2025, that rule is being rewritten.

Africa’s cross-border payments market is already worth around US$329 billion a year and is projected to more than triple to US$1 trillion by 2035, according to a new report by Oui Capital.

At the same time, new infrastructure is coming online to keep more of those flows on the continent and in local currencies:

• The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) is now live in multiple regions, connecting central banks and more than 150 commercial banks.

• The Africa Currency Marketplace, built on PAPSS, is launching to allow direct FX between African currencies without routing via the dollar.

• The COMESA bloc has rolled out a new Digital Retail Payments Platform (DRPP) that lets traders in 21 member states settle in local currencies, targeting transaction costs below 3%.

• In Kigali, African exchanges have agreed on multicurrency trading segments that allow securities to be issued and traded in dollars, euros and regional currencies on the same platform.

The ambition is clear: cut costs, speed up trade, and reduce dependence on a dollar-based system that often works forAfrica, but rarely for free.

Why cross-border payments became such a bottleneck

The Oui Capital report and Afreximbank’s latest trade analysis tell the same story in different ways.

Africa’s cross-border flows are big and growing, but they’re held back by three old frictions:

1. CostTraditional correspondent banking often pushes fees for low-value cross-border transfers well into double digits as a percentage of the transaction. For SMEs, that’s not friction – it’s a wall.

2. TimeMulti-hop routing – naira to dollars to euros to shillings – means payments can take days, if not weeks, to clear. That ties up working capital and strangles just-in-time supply chains.

3. AccessMany African banks have lost correspondent relationships. Smaller firms are pushed onto expensive third-party platforms or informal value-transfer channels, limiting scale and transparency.

The result: even as intra-African trade reached around US$208 billion in 2024 and is rising, it still lags behind the continent’s trade with the rest of the world.

If you are a manufacturer in Accra or a logistics operator in Nairobi, your biggest headache is often not winning the contract – it’s getting paid across borders efficiently.

PAPSS and the Africa Currency Marketplace: new pipes, new rules

PAPSS – backed by the African Union and Afreximbank – is the flagship attempt to fix this. It connects participating central banks and commercial banks so that:

• A buyer can pay in their own currency;

• A seller can receive in their own currency;

• Settlement happens instantly or near-instantly on a shared platform.

In 2025, PAPSS is moving to the next level with the Africa Currency Marketplace – a market-driven FX platform that allows direct exchange between African currencies without first converting into dollars or euros.

Instead of naira → dollar → birr, a Nigerian importer and Ethiopian airline can match trades and settle naira–birr directly, reducing:

• FX spreads

• The need for hard-currency balances

• The risk of funds being trapped in illiquid foreign accounts

Afreximbank estimates that making local-currency settlement work at scale could save the continent up to US$5 billion a year in hard-currency costs.

This isn’t about some ideological “de-dollarisation”. As PAPSS officials are careful to stress, it’s about cost, speed and financial sovereignty.

COMESA’s DRPP and the regional experiments

If PAPSS is the continental backbone, COMESA’s new Digital Retail Payments Platform is one of the most ambitious regional pilots.

Launched in October 2025, the DRPP lets traders across 21 countries in Eastern and Southern Africa settle transactions in local currencies – cutting out the dollar leg and promising fees below 3%.

Early trials between Malawi and Zambia use local digital financial services and FX providers to:

• Net off cross-border positions;

• Handle FX conversion automatically in the background;

• Deliver instant or same-day settlement to merchants’ local accounts.

Analysts note that many African currencies are less volatile against each other than against the dollar, meaning that a regional kwacha–shilling or kwacha–franc corridor can actually be less risky than a kwacha–dollar route – especially when hedging tools mature.

Other regional and national experiments include:

• Nigeria’s new PAPSS policy to route more cross-border trade via local-currency settlement.

• Rwanda’s launch of a Multicurrency Denominated Securities Market Segment, allowing bonds and other instruments to be listed and traded in US dollars and other currencies on the same platform as local securities.

Piece by piece, the scaffolding for a more African, less dollar-dependent payment and capital-markets system is being assembled.

Cash is still king – but the ground is shifting

None of this changes the fact that cash still dominates day-to-day transactions across much of the continent. As recent reporting has underlined, many merchants and consumers still distrust digital rails, worry about FX availability and struggle with patchy connectivity.

But the direction of travel is clear:

• Fintech-powered payment volumes are growing fast;

• Digital wallets and super-apps are expanding from domestic to regional services;

• Banks are under pressure to offer real-time, low-cost cross-border options to avoid losing customers to non-bank platforms.

For institutions, the biggest shift is not just technological. It’s balance-sheet and risk management.

Cross-border flows that once trickled through a handful of correspondent accounts are now moving:

• Through multiple regional platforms;

• In a wider range of African currencies;

• And alongside more complex capital-markets instruments (multicurrency bonds, ETFs, structured products tied to AfCFTA corridors).

That complexity is where things can go wrong – or very right.

Where Verī Platform fits: seeing the whole cross-border picture

This is exactly the environment Verī Platform is built for.

Verī sits behind banks, asset managers, payment institutions and custodians – not in front of retail customers – and provides the “plumbing” to see and manage exposures across increasingly tangled cross-border rails.

For African and international institutions plugged into PAPSS, DRPP, multicurrency exchanges and traditional FX, Verī can help:

• Consolidate cross-border positions across all payment systems – correspondent banking, PAPSS, COMESA DRPP, card schemes, fintech aggregators – into a single, look-through ledger at client, portfolio and institution level.

• Map currency and corridor risk: how much flow and exposure sits in naira–cedi, shilling–rand, kwacha–franc, and how that interacts with hard-currency positions.

• Integrate payments data and investment portfolios, so that trade-finance lines, receivables, local-currency bonds and multicurrency listings are seen as parts of one risk picture.

• Produce regulator-friendly reporting showing supervisors where FX, settlement and counterparty risks are building as new platforms gain traction.

Verī doesn’t compete with PAPSS, COMESA DRPP or any exchange.It acts as a neutral hub, helping institutions and regulators see how all these new pipes connect – and where the pressure points might be.

Africa’s cross-border payments revolution is not a headline about crypto or a single app.

It is a slow, deliberate rewiring of how money moves between 54 countries – from US$329 billion today to a projected US$1 trillion a year by 2035.

If the plumbing holds, that could mean:

• Cheaper trade for SMEs;

• Faster settlement for manufacturers and logistics firms;

• Less hard-currency drain for central banks;

• More of Africa’s own savings financing Africa’s own growth.

But that outcome is not automatic. It depends on whether the technology, regulation and risk infrastructure keep pace with the ambition.

That, increasingly, is where platforms like Verī – invisible to the end user, critical to the system – will make the difference between a payment revolution that empowers the continent and one that simply shifts old bottlenecks into new places.

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