We stand on the precipice of a new dawn in Africa. In May, Accra is set to host the 3i Africa Summit, a platform publicly positioned around innovation, investment, and impact, and framed by government and central-bank voices as a serious response to how value is “created, transferred, and regulated” in Africa’s rapidly evolving financial ecosystem.
Africa’s fragmented payment structures are not a novel issue. It is just becoming harder to ignore. Sending money across borders remains expensive, slow, and unpredictable, often significantly exceeding global average costs. The global average and settlement speed targets 35% of cross-border payments to settle within an hour globally. This is the backdrop against which stablecoins are gaining traction as a new settlement infrastructure rather than a speculative asset.
The strategic question before us is no longer whether stablecoins will touch African finance. The relevant question is whether African banks will institutionalise and govern that role, embedding stablecoin rails inside the regulated perimeter—or whether the next settlement infrastructure in Africa will continue to scale primarily outside bank balance sheets, outside formal liquidity governance, and outside supervisory line-of-sight. These are crucial questions as the digital assets continue to be shaped. The addressable market for cross-border payment value currently stands at $194.6 trillion in 2024, forecast to reach $320.2 trillion by 2032.
Will African banks step forward to institutionalise stablecoins within regulated systems? Or will they allow a parallel financial infrastructure to scale faster, cheaper, and increasingly dominant, outside their balance sheets and beyond their control?
This is not a minor change. The global market for cross-border payments is expected to grow from $194.6 trillion in 2024 to $320.2 trillion by 2032. The question is not if Africa will join, but on what terms.
The cost of standing still
The inefficiencies in Africa’s cross-border payments system are well documented, but they are often understated in their cumulative impact.
According to the World Bank, the global average cost of sending $200 stood at 6.49% in Q1 2025. Sub-Saharan Africa remains the most expensive receiving region at 8.78%, with banks charging an average of 14.55%, the highest among all provider categories.
