Africa's path to economic transformation runs directly through the architecture of its financial systems — and until those systems speak to each other across borders and income levels, the continent's growth story will remain incomplete. That was the central message from financial experts who gathered to address the urgent question of how Africa's fragmented monetary and payments infrastructure is costing the continent billions of dollars in lost trade, productivity, and investment every year.
The human cost of that fragmentation is most visible in Nigeria. Of Africa's largest economy's estimated 220 million people, roughly 38 million adults remain entirely outside the formal financial system, according to EFInA's most recent Access to Finance survey. In the North-East and North-West — zones still battered by insecurity and displacement — financial exclusion rates run as high as 60 percent in some states, meaning that a Maiduguri market trader or a Zamfara smallholder farmer has no reliable bridge between their daily hustle and the broader economy.
The argument the experts are making is not abstract. Integrated financial systems — platforms that allow seamless value transfer between mobile money wallets, commercial bank accounts, microfinance institutions, and cross-border payment rails — have already demonstrated their power in East Africa. Kenya's M-Pesa ecosystem, which today processes transactions equivalent to nearly half of the country's GDP, is the benchmark that West Africa is still chasing.
Nigeria has made measurable progress. The Central Bank of Nigeria's push on bank verification numbers, USSD banking, and the eNaira central bank digital currency have incrementally broadened access. The NIBSS Instant Payment infrastructure now settles billions of naira in transactions daily. But connectivity across African borders remains a chokepoint — a Lagos importer paying a Ghanaian supplier still navigates a tangle of correspondent banking fees, foreign exchange friction, and settlement delays that can stretch across days.
The experts stressed that integration must move beyond national systems to become a continental reality, pointing to the African Continental Free Trade Area as both the opportunity and the urgency. The AfCFTA, which has the potential to lift 30 million Africans out of extreme poverty and add $450 billion to continental income by 2035 according to World Bank projections, cannot reach those numbers without a payments backbone that allows small and medium enterprises in Kano, Nairobi, Accra, and Dakar to trade with the same ease that a business in Frankfurt trades with one in Warsaw.
Watchers of Nigeria's financial policy space will be tracking whether the CBN and the Federal Ministry of Finance deepen engagement with initiatives like the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System — PAPSS — which the Afreximbank launched to reduce dollar dependency in intra-African trade. With Nigeria accounting for roughly a quarter of sub-Saharan Africa's economic output, Abuja's commitment or hesitation on financial integration will effectively set the pace for the entire region. Timelines for meaningful cross-border interoperability remain fluid, but the experts' consensus was that the window for decisive action is narrowing.
