Why should two African businesses need access to the US dollar to trade with each other? Why should a Nigerian manufacturer buying goods from Kenya be exposed to the availability of a currency neither business uses domestically? And why do we continue celebrating local-currency payment systems without asking whether the financial arrangements behind them have actually reduced that dependence?
I believe Africa is at risk of confusing the appearance of financial independence with the achievement of it.
We have become remarkably good at building payment applications that conceal the complexity of moving money across borders. A customer sends naira, another receives Kenyan shillings, and both see a successful transaction. But the most consequential question is rarely asked: what currency was required to discharge the obligations between the financial institutions involved?
As a backend engineer working with distributed systems, cloud infrastructure and financial technology, I see this as more than a monetary policy debate. It is a question about who controls the infrastructure on which African commerce depends.
If a payment begins and ends in African currencies but still depends on foreign-currency settlement behind the scenes, we have improved the customer’s experience without necessarily removing the underlying dependency.
Africa cannot afford to mistake one for the other.
According to Afreximbank’s 2025 African Trade Report, intra-African trade reached approximately $220.3 billion in 2024. Yet businesses operating across the continent continue to encounter currency convertibility constraints, uneven foreign exchange liquidity and costly settlement arrangements.
These are not minor administrative inconveniences. They influence whether businesses can obtain supplies, repatriate revenue, pay employees and expand into neighbouring markets.
The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) represents genuine progress. It enables participating financial institutions to process payments in local currencies, reducing the need for customers to arrange conventional foreign-currency conversions.
But PAPSS also demonstrates why we must distinguish customer-facing payments from the arrangements that settle obligations between participating institutions.
Its published core settlement process includes local-currency net positions and corresponding hard-currency settlement instructions through Afreximbank.
There are sound financial reasons for such arrangements. They help participating institutions manage obligations across different currencies. But I reject the suggestion that making foreign-currency dependence invisible to customers necessarily means Africa has overcome it.
The real test is whether businesses and financial institutions can increasingly complete regional transactions through direct African-currency liquidity without requiring an intermediate reserve currency.
That is where I believe the next phase of African payment development must focus.
And we need to acknowledge an uncomfortable truth: software cannot create liquidity simply because engineers have built a faster way to request it.
An API can transmit a payment instruction in milliseconds. A distributed workflow can coordinate multiple financial services. Cloud infrastructure can support transaction processing across countries. None of these capabilities guarantees that an institution holding naira can find another willing to exchange it for shillings at a sustainable price.
The limitation is not always processing speed. Sometimes, the financial market required to complete the transaction is simply too shallow.
Africa does not merely need faster payment systems. It needs deeper markets in which African currencies can be exchanged directly, predictably and at commercially viable rates.
The launch of the PAPSS African Currency Marketplace in July 2025 is a meaningful response. Developed with Interstellar, the marketplace allows eligible participants to exchange African currencies directly without an intermediate hard-currency conversion. PAPSS reported that its pilot involved more than 80 African businesses transacting across 12 currency pairs.
That is the direction worth pursuing. But launching a marketplace and establishing sustained liquidity across African currencies are different achievements.
How many currency pairs attract consistent trading activity? What happens during periods of exchange-rate volatility? Can businesses obtain reasonable quotations for larger transactions? Can financial institutions settle obligations safely when one participating system experiences an outage?
These questions deserve as much attention as the number of institutions connected to a platform.
From a distributed systems perspective, this is where architecture becomes economically consequential.
Cross-border settlement involves independent organisations, different operating conditions and systems that cannot always complete actions simultaneously. If one institution delivers its currency while the counterparty fails to deliver the other, the transaction creates financial exposure.
The Bank for International Settlements has long recognised payment-versus-payment arrangements as a means of addressing this risk. Such mechanisms link the final transfer of one currency to the final transfer of the other.
I believe African payment infrastructure should place this kind of settlement protection, verifiable transaction states, safe recovery and transparent reconciliation at the centre of its development.
Technologies such as Temporal can help coordinate long-running transactions and recover processes after technical failures. But they cannot guarantee currency availability or create legal settlement finality. Engineering teams must build around those financial realities rather than disguise them behind successful API responses.
There is a reasonable counterargument that the dollar remains central to international trade and that abandoning established settlement arrangements could introduce unnecessary risk.
I agree that Africa does not need to eliminate foreign currencies from its economy. Nor should banks abandon safeguards merely to achieve a symbolic claim of independence.
But accepting the dollar’s role in global finance is not the same as accepting its use as an unavoidable intermediary for every viable transaction between African currencies.
Financial dependence should be a commercial choice where alternatives exist, not an architectural assumption that nobody questions.
I would like African regulators, payment operators and technology companies to begin measuring something more demanding than transaction speed and platform participation: the proportion of regional trade settled directly through African-currency pairs, the liquidity available in those markets, the real cost to businesses and the reliability of settlement.
Those figures would help establish whether we are building financial capacity or simply digitising old dependencies.
Africa’s ambition should not be to replace foreign-currency reliance with a slogan about monetary sovereignty. It should be to build the financial markets, technical safeguards and commercial arrangements that make greater regional currency independence practical.
The question is no longer whether Africa can build applications that move money across borders. We have demonstrated that capability. The question is whether we are prepared to redesign the financial arrangements that have made foreign currencies so central to trade between our own economies.
Until we address that distinction, Africa may continue building sophisticated payment platforms while leaving some of the most consequential financial dependencies unchanged.
About the Author
Oluwatosin Thompson is a backend engineer specialising in distributed systems, cloud infrastructure and financial technology. Her technical interests include Temporal, AWS, workflow orchestration, transaction processing and fault-tolerant backend architecture. She focuses on how reliable software systems can support more accountable and dependable financial infrastructure.
