For over 28 years, Swift Connect Africa has been bringing together members of the Sub-Saharan Africa community to engage in eye-opening industry discussions, network, and reflect on shared opportunities and challenges. This year’s event was no different. In an industry that’s witnessing change like never before, over 500 delegates came together in Nairobi to hear talks on emerging technologies, globalisation and the future of money.
Sub-Saharan Africa spans more than 40 countries, all progressing towards digitisation at different rates. This makes achieving interoperability across the continent an opportunity that is not without its challenges. With this in mind, we look at what the future holds for Africa’s payments ecosystem and unpack key takeaways from this year’s event.
A huge opportunity
Africa's payments industry is booming. Electronic and instant payments systems are redefining day-to-day transactions in a continent where cash remains king, and where a youthful population is driving digitisation at a rapid rate. In fact, Africa currently accounts for 70% of the world’s $1 trillion mobile money value.
But despite this rapid pace of change, the Sub-Saharan Africa payments landscape lacks uniformity. Due to infrastructure readiness, regulatory environments, and other socioeconomic factors, huge gaps exist between the most and least digitised countries. And, with innovative technologies challenging the status quo, the need for an interconnected payments ecosystem has never been greater if the region is to continue growing sustainably in an increasingly globalised world.
All this presents a unique opportunity for interoperability which, if achieved, could foster economic growth and financial inclusion, enhance global trade, and lead to widespread benefits for citizens and businesses alike.
Established banks and emerging market players are both eager to capitalise on this potential, striving to reduce friction and increase the speed of both domestic and international payments. To ensure that the various infrastructures and payment systems of the future can interconnect, common standards and interoperability are essential.
The importance of community collaboration
Institutions, regulators and governing bodies around the world clearly understand the need to facilitate this interoperability, but also place high value on community collaboration. The G20’s roadmap to enhance cross-border payments are a good example of this – these industry-level initiatives play a crucial role in enabling progress.
Talks at this year’s Swift Connect Africa touched on this, unpacking how the industry can collectively work to meet the G20’s goals, and emphasising the importance of extending its objectives beyond the G7 countries. As the 2027 deadline for achieving these goals edges closer, we’re working with our community to help institutions achieve them. By doing so, we’ll be able to realise an instant, frictionless and truly interoperable financial system.
A significant milestone in this journey was the industry’s adoption of ISO 20022, which ushers in a new era of richer, more structured data. This adoption has huge potential to help reduce the compliance-related complexity that is particularly challenging for a market as large and diverse as Sub-Saharan Africa. Recently, the South African Reserve Bank (SADC) RTGS successfully migrated to the new standard – a significant milestone for the community that will enhance the efficiency and security of cross-border transactions.
Global adoption is needed
For ISO 20022 to have a tangible and positive impact, global adoption is essential. To realise the benefits the richer data it brings, migration is not enough. Instead, a scalable network of market participants must also uniformly apply it too. With the November 2025 ISO migration deadline approaching, we’re collaborating closely with the community to ensure financial institutions’ migration and adoption runs as smoothly as possible.
Similarly, when launched in 2017, the rollout of Swift GPI helped transform the transparency of cross-border transactions. The solution plays a key role in enabling instant and frictionless transactions, providing end-to-end transparency and tracking. It enhances operational efficiency, reduces costs, strengthens correspondent relationships, and delivers new value to customers. For corporates, it offers better liquidity management, fee transparency, and certainty in payment flows.
Today, Swift GPI is the norm throughout cross-border payments, and adoption continues to grow. For Sub-Saharan Africa, adoption of Swift GPI is helping lay the foundations for future innovation. Currently, 56% of all payments sent globally are fully GPI-enabled end-to-end, while 30% of all payments sent from Africa are fully GPI-enabled. Clearly, there is still a significant opportunity for the African payments landscape to fully embrace this solution and in doing so, provide enhanced value to their customer base.
The benefits of a global network
Swift is integral to Africa's financial infrastructure, powering 25 Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) systems across the continent. International Swift traffic in the region continues to grow year-on-year compared with domestic flows, indicating an increasingly globalised posture that we’re well-placed to support. Our global network of over 11,500 institutions can help facilitate interoperability across Sub-Saharan Africa’s diverse payments landscape and support the continent as it continues to do business with the rest of the world.
Digitisation will continue to be a significant driver of economic transformation in Africa, affecting all types of industrial and commercial activities across the continent, and consequently, payment flows. The next step for both the public and private sectors is to leverage the growing resources and best practices that make interoperability attainable. Given the strong regional relationships in Africa, there is a unique opportunity to connect domestic and regional infrastructures to enable cross-border payments, paving the way for a more inclusive and economically robust future for the continent.
