Visa is rolling out new capabilities aimed at bringing more African merchants into the digital payments ecosystem, deepening a broader push into the continent that already includes a planned $1 billion investment and the company’s first African data centre.
New Tools For Small Merchants
The expansion centres on two of Visa’s existing platforms, Visa Accept and Visa Direct. Visa Accept turns a smartphone into a card payment terminal, allowing micro-sellers to accept card payments directly through their Visa debit or prepaid accounts without needing separate hardware. Visa Direct complements this by giving small businesses a real-time money movement platform they can use to send payouts to suppliers, staff, or partners.
Speaking at the Visa Payments Forum, Shahebaz Khan, the company’s senior vice president and head of commercial and money movement solutions for the Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa region, said the goal is to reduce the barriers that keep merchants locked out of digital payments. Roughly 90 million merchants across the region still do not accept digital payments, even as demand for cashless transactions continues to rise.
Addressing A Persistent Financial Inclusion Gap
The push comes against the backdrop of a large unbanked population. An estimated 1.3 billion people globally remain outside the formal banking system, with more than half of them concentrated in the Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa region. Khan noted that digitising payments carries a secondary benefit for merchants beyond convenience, since building a documented transaction history can help small business owners qualify for credit and other financial services down the line.
Part Of A Larger Continental Strategy
This latest rollout builds on a broader set of investments Visa has made across Africa in recent months. The company has committed to investing $1 billion in the continent by 2027, a pledge aimed at deepening collaboration with governments, financial institutions, mobile network operators, fintechs, and merchants. As part of that strategy, Visa opened its first African data centre in Johannesburg, an investment of roughly $54 million designed to route more transactions locally rather than through data centres in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Singapore.
Processing payments locally is expected to reduce transaction costs and latency for African users, while also addressing growing data sovereignty demands from governments in markets such as Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa, where regulators increasingly require that citizen data remain within national borders.
Fintech Accelerator Continues To Scale
Visa has also continued to expand its Africa Fintech Accelerator programme, which has now supported more than 100 startups across the continent since its launch. The programme’s most recent cohort drew applicants from 28 markets, including newer entrants such as Burkina Faso and Djibouti, reflecting how fintech innovation is spreading beyond the continent’s traditional hubs in Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa.
Startups in the programme have increasingly focused on cross-border payments built on stablecoin infrastructure, alongside artificial intelligence applications for credit scoring, fraud prevention, and digital identity verification, areas where conventional financial data remains limited across many African markets.
