PAPSS to power 80% of Africa's payments in five years - Mike Ogbalu

Chief Executive Officer of the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), Mike Ogbalu III has set an audacious target of processing 80% of Africa’s commercial payments through PAPSS within five years, as the platform achieves 2,000% growth and expands to 20 countries.

Speaking during a session on the AfCFTA podcast, Mike Ogbalu III revealed that PAPSS currently connects 160 of Africa’s largest commercial banks and 14 payment switches across the continent, with two major Francophone central banks expected to join before end of 2025, adding 14 more countries to the network.

According to the PAPSS CEO, the expansion would bring PAPSS close to achieving continental coverage and represents a dramatic acceleration from the pilot phase that began three years ago in six West African Monetary Zone countries.

“We have gone through the phase of infancy and now we are at that acceleration stage,” Ogbalu said, describing PAPSS as “building a car and driving it at the same time.”

The payment system’s core achievement is enabling instant cross-border transactions that previously took days to complete whilst charging significantly lower fees than traditional banking channels.

Ogbalu III offered a compelling example of a small trader who travels from Nigeria to Dakar to buy materials for resale, who previously spent days confirming payments and carried large amounts of cash across borders. Now, using PAPSS, payments are completed in approximately seven seconds, including all anti-money laundering and sanctions screening checks.

“In those seven seconds we go through all the compliance checks, and the money arrives at his seller’s bank account and he gets an alert,” he explained. “The time that he would have spent trying to confirm payments is now more time for him to turn around his inventories.”

Mike Ogbalu III challenged observers to find any payment system globally that can process cross-border payments with full regulatory compliance in seven (7) seconds.

The CEO framed PAPSS as more than a technical solution, positioning it as a matter of economic sovereignty for the continent. Despite Africa possessing 70% of the world’s uncultivated arable land and producing 70% of global cocoa, intra-African trade remains stuck at 15-18% of total trade figure that has actually declined from closer to 20% in previous years.

He illustrated the problem using the cocoa value chain: African countries producing cocoa appropriate barely 5% of its value, selling raw beans whilst other African countries go outside the continent to buy processed cocoa products. Global multinationals capture as much as 60% of cocoa’s value.

“If you have a situation where Africa’s trade is dependent on a payment system that is not controlled by it, that is not fit for purpose. You have a situation where sometimes people are able to determine to say we do not want this African country to trade,” he warned.

PAPSS addresses this by creating a world-class payment system overseen by a college of African central banks, ensuring that decisions about which countries can transact are made on the continent itself rather than in distant financial centres.

The current 20-country network spans all five African regions: Nigeria, Ghana, Gambia, Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia in West Africa; Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi in Southern Africa; Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi, Djibouti, and Uganda in East Africa; and Egypt, Algeria, and Morocco in North Africa.