Payments on the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System grew by about 1,000 per cent over the past year. The value of those payments grew by about 120 per cent. Mike Ogbalu III, the chief executive, gave the figures at a media briefing in Lagos this month. PAPSS now runs in more than 30 African countries, and from 2027 its stated priority shifts from signing up institutions to getting people to actually use them.

PAPSS is the payment network built by the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) and adopted by the African Union as the plumbing for the African Continental Free Trade Area. It launched in Accra in January 2022. In practice it lets a business in Nairobi pay a supplier in Lagos in shillings, with the supplier receiving naira, and no dollar in the middle.

That middle is the reason it exists. A Kenyan importer paying a Nigerian supplier today converts KES into USD, sends the dollars through a correspondent bank outside Africa, and the supplier converts the dollars into naira. Two currency spreads, one foreign bank’s fee, and three to seven working days. Afreximbank puts the average cost of sending money across an African border at 7 to 8 per cent of the amount sent, against a global average of 6 to 7 per cent.

PAPSS swaps the foreign bank for the central banks. Your bank sends the instruction, PAPSS validates it, the central bank on the other side credits the recipient’s bank in its own currency, and at the end of the cycle the central banks settle only the difference between them. Ogbalu’s example from the briefing: “If $10 million worth of transactions is going into Ghana, and $9 million is going from Ghana into Nigeria, our system says that only the $1 million equivalent is what will change hands.” Hard currency is needed for that $1 million, not for the $19 million of trade behind it. That is where the claimed savings come from.

PAPSS’s own numbers: 92 to 95 per cent off the cost of a transaction, a 99.99 per cent cut in processing time, and up to 80 per cent less foreign exchange needed. Payments land in about seven seconds against a service guarantee of 120. The workings behind those percentages haven’t been published.

A 1,000 per cent rise in volume is roughly 11 times as many payments. A 120 per cent rise in value is roughly 2.2 times the money. Divide one by the other and the average PAPSS payment is now about a fifth of what it was a year ago. Nigeria, the only country PAPSS broke out, shows it more sharply still: volumes up about 1,100 per cent, values up about 125 per cent.

That is what happens when a system built for bank and corporate transfers starts carrying small business and personal ones. A network that moves a few enormous treasury payments is a treasury product. A network that moves many small ones is something an SME importing fabric from Lagos, or a student paying fees in Kampala, can use.

None of it comes with an absolute figure. PAPSS didn’t say how many payments it processed or what they were worth, so 1,000 per cent is growth from a base nobody outside the system can see.

The Central Bank of Kenya joined PAPSS in September 2023, the tenth central bank to sign up. KCB went live in March 2025, the first bank in East Africa on the network, alongside Bank of Kigali in Rwanda.

The bigger shift came in February, when Pesalink, the bank-owned switch that moves money between Kenyan accounts, plugged into PAPSS. That put more than 80 Kenyan banks, SACCOs, fintechs and telcos within reach of the network, and it made mobile money wallets a valid destination for an inbound African payment rather than bank accounts only. We covered that integration at the time, including what it does to the fintechs whose whole business is moving money across those same borders.

Ogbalu called Pesalink “the first switch we’ve piloted for transaction termination in Kenya” and said adoption was already rising. He gave no Kenyan numbers. Nigeria is the only market PAPSS attached figures to.

South Africa isn’t on the network at all, which leaves out one of the continent’s largest economies and a real trade partner for Kenya. Being connected also isn’t the same as being available. Your bank still has to build PAPSS into its app and price it, and most Kenyan banks haven’t said what a PAPSS transfer costs. Pricing is where these rails either work for ordinary customers or don’t, and a cheap rail with an expensive fee on top of it is just an expensive transfer.

PAPSS expects to be in 38 countries by the end of 2026 and wants all 54 within five years. More products are in pilot, with announcements promised before the year is out, and links to payment systems in China and India are targeted for the first quarter of 2027. The next set of numbers should come at PAPSS COWRY 2026, its annual conference, on 26 and 27 November in Addis Ababa, co-hosted with the National Bank of Ethiopia. The figures to ask for there are the plain ones: how much money actually moved, and how much of it was Kenyan.