Cross-Border Payments in Africa: Breaking Down Barriers with Technology

Cross-border payments in Africa have always been more than financial transactions. They represent the movement of trade, the lifeline of families, and the backbone of regional integration. Yet for decades, these flows have been hindered by fragmented banking systems, regulatory disparities, high costs, and limited interoperability.

By 2025, a new phase has begun. African fintech is no longer just about local digital wallets or mobile money. The real frontier is the cross-border layer – how to enable seamless, compliant, and affordable transactions across dozens of jurisdictions and currencies. Technology, supported by a new class of infrastructure players such as Unipesa, is finally turning this vision into reality.

The Structural Problem

Africa’s financial fragmentation is both geographic and systemic. The continent is home to 54 countries, each with its own central bank, regulatory frameworks, and banking networks. Unlike the EU, there is no single currency or unified settlement system. Even within regional blocs like ECOWAS or the EAC, interoperability between financial systems remains inconsistent.

This fragmentation creates friction at multiple levels:

• Cost: The World Bank has consistently ranked sub-Saharan Africa as the most expensive region for remittances, with average fees between 8 and 10%.
  
• Time: Transfers between neighboring countries can take days, routed through correspondent banks in Europe or the U.S.
  
• Access: Small businesses and informal traders, who make up the bulk of Africa’s cross-border economy, often cannot use traditional banking channels at all.
  

The result is a paradox: Africa is one of the most mobile-first, digitally connected regions in the world, but its cross-border financial rails remain stubbornly outdated.

Why Technology Matters

Cross-border payments are not just about moving money; they require coordination of identity, compliance, liquidity, and trust. Technology is the only way to handle these at scale.

Recent advances include:

• API-driven integrations that allow fintechs and banks to connect across borders without rebuilding systems from scratch.
• Real-time compliance engines that conduct KYC/AML checks instantly across multiple jurisdictions.
• Mobile-first settlement layers that align with Africa’s existing adoption of mobile money.
• Stablecoins and CBDC pilots, which are beginning to reduce dependency on correspondent banking chains.

The promise of technology is not to erase national differences but to create an infrastructure layer that makes those differences less of a barrier.

Unipesa’s Role in the New Infrastructure

In this emerging landscape, Unipesa has positioned itself as a backbone provider. Unlike consumer-facing apps, Unipesa builds the infrastructure that allows fintechs, banks, and enterprises to offer cross-border services without reinventing the wheel.

Its approach is threefold:

1. Interoperability: Unipesa integrates with mobile money operators, banks, and payment processors across markets, ensuring that money moves seamlessly between disparate systems.
2. Compliance: By embedding regulatory checks into its infrastructure, Unipesa makes it easier for fintechs and SMEs to operate legally across multiple jurisdictions without heavy upfront investment.
3. Scalability: Infrastructure must hold up under growth. Unipesa’s platform is designed for high transaction volumes, making it viable for both startups and established enterprises.

In essence, Unipesa abstracts the complexity of cross-border payments into a set of reliable, secure, and developer-friendly services.

The SME Factor

Much of the cross-border payment conversation focuses on remittances, but the real growth lies in SMEs. Informal and small businesses account for over 80% of employment in Africa and drive a large portion of intra-African trade.

For these businesses, traditional banks are often inaccessible or impractical. Currency conversion costs, settlement delays, and regulatory barriers can erode slim profit margins.

Platforms leveraging infrastructure like Unipesa’s give SMEs new options:

• Instant settlements across borders.
• Lower transaction costs through direct integrations rather than correspondent banking.
• Built-in compliance reduces the risk of transactions being frozen or reversed.

This creates a multiplier effect. When SMEs gain easier access to regional trade, they scale faster, hire more, and strengthen supply chains. Cross-border fintech infrastructure thus becomes an engine of economic growth rather than just a technical solution.

Regulation: The Balancing Act

Regulators face a dual challenge: encouraging innovation while protecting financial systems from abuse. Cross-border payments are particularly sensitive because they can be exploited for money laundering, terrorism financing, or illicit trade.

The trend across Africa is toward harmonization. Initiatives like the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), supported by Afreximbank, aim to provide continent-wide settlement infrastructure. Yet PAPSS is not a silver bullet- it needs private sector players to connect last-mile use cases.

This is where Unipesa’s compliance infrastructure becomes indispensable. Instead of treating regulation as an afterthought, it builds compliance directly into the platform. Startups and enterprises using Unipesa effectively “inherit” regulatory best practices, aligning with both national rules and regional initiatives.

For regulators, this provides assurance. For businesses, it lowers barriers to entry.

The Human Dimension

Behind the technical architecture are people- migrants sending money home, traders moving goods across borders, students paying fees abroad. For them, the difference between a two-day delay and an instant transfer is tangible.

• A Kenyan truck driver delivering goods to Uganda needs real-time payment confirmation before unloading.
• A Nigerian exporter receiving payments from Ghana must avoid double conversion costs eroding profits.
• A Malawian family relying on remittances from South Africa needs predictability, not uncertainty, in transfer times.

By addressing these use cases, Unipesa and similar infrastructure providers make cross-border payments not only faster and cheaper but more humane.

The Next Five Years

Cross-border fintech in Africa is at an inflection point. Over the next five years, three trends will shape its trajectory:

1. Regionalization of Settlement Systems
   PAPSS and other regional schemes will reduce dependency on external correspondent banks. Unipesa will play a bridging role, connecting these systems to local fintechs and SMEs.
2. Embedded Finance for Trade
   Cross-border payments will not remain standalone products. They will be embedded directly into logistics platforms, e-commerce marketplaces, and B2B trade systems. Infrastructure players like Unipesa are already building the APIs to make this integration seamless.
3. Digital Currencies as Settlement Tools
   Stablecoins and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) are being tested as tools for cross-border settlement. Their success will depend on robust infrastructure – again, an area where Unipesa provides the rails.

Why Infrastructure Players Matter

It is tempting to focus only on the consumer-facing fintech apps – the wallets, the super-apps, the flashy brands. But without infrastructure, these apps would collapse under regulatory, technical, or liquidity challenges.

Unipesa’s importance lies in its invisibility. When transactions just work, when SMEs expand across borders without friction, when regulators have oversight without stifling innovation – that is the result of infrastructure quietly doing its job.

The future of cross-border payments in Africa will not be defined by who captures headlines, but by who builds the backbone.

Conclusion

Cross-border payments in Africa have long been constrained by fragmentation, inefficiency, and high costs. Technology is breaking these barriers, but the true enablers are infrastructure providers who make it possible for innovation to scale.

Unipesa exemplifies this new layer of fintech – quiet, robust, and indispensable. By combining interoperability, compliance, and scalability, it is enabling startups, SMEs, and enterprises to participate fully in Africa’s cross-border economy.

As the continent moves toward greater integration, the success of its financial systems will depend not on individual apps but on the resilience of the infrastructure beneath them. With players like Unipesa powering that foundation, Africa’s cross-border payments future looks less like a distant aspiration and more like an unfolding reality.