Nigeria’s government wants Africans to be able to pay each other without the dollar sitting in the middle.
At the Afreximbank Annual Meetings in Abuja, Nigerian officials threw their weight behind a cross-border African payment card that would settle transactions in local currencies, with no detour through the US dollar or the euro first. The pitch is the one you’d expect: cheaper trade, faster settlement, less exposure to currency swings, and more of Africa’s payment value and data staying on the continent instead of routing through networks based overseas.
It’s a genuinely good goal. It’s also, in large part, a goal Africa has already built the machinery for. The interesting question isn’t whether the idea is sound. It’s why the thing already exists and still hasn’t taken over.
What Nigeria Is Backing
The logic starts with a frustration most African businesses know well. Two companies on the same continent often still settle a payment in dollars, even when neither party is American. That means a conversion on the way in, a conversion on the way out, fees at each step, and days of waiting while the money loops through a correspondent bank abroad. A continent-wide card that clears directly in local currencies would cut that loop out, and it lines up neatly with the African Continental Free Trade Area’s goal of making intra-African trade actually flow.
The market is big enough to matter. Africa’s cross-border payments could reach $1 trillion by 2035, up from around $329 billion in 2025, and the continent loses billions every year to foreign exchange friction and fragmented rules. Trim that, and the savings are real.
The Rails Already Exist
Here’s the part the framing tends to skip. Africa has been laying this exact track for years. The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) launched in 2022, backed by Afreximbank, the African Union, and the AfCFTA secretariat, to let banks settle cross-border payments directly in local currencies. It now connects more than 19 central banks and over 150 commercial banks, and early data points to cost savings of up to 27% for users.
The card itself isn’t new either. PAPSSCARD, billed as Africa’s first pan-African card scheme, launched at these same Afreximbank meetings a year ago, a joint venture with Mercury Payment Services that processes payments entirely within Africa. A few weeks later came the PAPSS African Currency Marketplace, which lets a firm earning naira swap straight into shillings without a dollar leg. PAPSS CEO Mike Ogbalu III has described the aim plainly: a system where money moves in local currencies, instantly, “without reliance on third-party currencies.” So when Nigerian officials champion the idea now, they’re not unveiling something. They’re trying to push adoption of something that’s been live for a while.
Why It Hasn’t Taken Over Yet
If the rails work and the savings are real, the obvious question is why most African card payments still run through global networks. Part of it is habit and reach: Visa and Mastercard are everywhere, accepted everywhere, and trusted by merchants who’ve used them for decades. Part of it is that a payment network is only as useful as the number of places that take it, and a young scheme has to earn that acceptance bank by bank, country by country. The infrastructure being technically capable and the infrastructure being the default are two very different things, and the gap between them is measured in years.
The Contradiction at the Center
The deeper obstacle is the awkward one, because it sits inside the same governments pushing the card. A borderless payment system needs central banks to let money, and data, move freely across their borders. Yet many of those same central banks are doing the opposite to protect their own currencies. As one Nigerian fintech executive put it recently, the real risk is regulatory protectionism, with central banks reaching for data localisation and liquidity-trapping rules to defend local currencies.
Nigeria is the clearest example of the tension. The same CBN that supports a dollar-free continental card has also ordered banks and fintechs to store payment data inside Nigeria by 2027, a rule about keeping data and control at home. Both instincts, integrate the continent and protect the nation, are reasonable on their own. They just pull in opposite directions. Building the card was the hard engineering problem, and Africa solved it. Getting more than fifty sovereign central banks to actually loosen their grip at the same time is the harder political one, and that’s the part Nigeria’s latest push still has to win.