By Oluoma Onyeukwa
Africa’s fintech industry has become exceptionally good at creating new ways to hold and send money. What it has not done nearly as well is ensure that money can move reliably between the systems it has created. We celebrate new wallets, expanding user bases and rising transaction volumes, yet millions of businesses and consumers still navigate fragmented payment networks, failed transfers and costly cross-border transactions.
I believe the industry’s next major breakthrough will not come from another payment application. It will come from confronting a problem that has received far too little commercial attention: the inability of financial systems to communicate and operate reliably together.
For too long, African fintech has treated customer acquisition as evidence of financial progress. The more users a platform attracts, the more successful we consider it. But a growing number of wallets tells us very little about whether the underlying financial system is becoming easier, cheaper or safer to use.
AfricaNenda’s 2025 State of Inclusive Instant Payment Systems report identified 36 operational instant payment systems across Africa, with only 11 supporting cross-border payments. These figures reveal an uncomfortable reality. We are creating digital payment infrastructure faster than we are connecting it.
Consider a small business owner in Lagos purchasing goods from a supplier in Nairobi. Both may have access to sophisticated financial applications. Yet completing a transaction can still involve multiple intermediaries, foreign exchange costs and uncertainty over settlement. The problem is not that either party lacks a wallet. The problem is that the financial systems serving them are not sufficiently connected.
Every additional application built on disconnected infrastructure risks reproducing the same limitations behind a different interface.
This is why I question the industry’s continued obsession with launching products while treating interoperability as a secondary concern. Fintech companies understandably want to retain customers, protect transaction revenue and build competitive advantages. But when commercial success depends on keeping users within proprietary systems, the interests of individual platforms can conflict with the needs of the wider economy.
We cannot build a connected African economy through financial products designed primarily to keep customers inside separate networks.
There is already evidence of a better direction. In February 2026, Kenya’s Pesalink partnered with the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System, connecting more than 80 participants in its network with a wider network of over 160 banks and fintechs. The arrangement supports cross-border payments in local currencies and demonstrates the value of linking established financial infrastructure.
This is the kind of progress I believe deserves greater investment. Rather than requiring businesses to adopt another platform, connected networks can make their existing financial services more useful.
But interoperability alone will not be enough. Africa’s next payment challenge is also a data problem.
Financial institutions process enormous amounts of transaction information, including payment failures, disputes, suspicious activity and settlement patterns. Much of this information remains confined to individual organisations, even when related transactions pass through multiple providers.
That fragmentation weakens the industry’s ability to identify emerging fraud patterns, investigate failed transfers and understand risks that extend beyond a single platform.
Data science offers an opportunity to address this. Machine learning can support transaction monitoring and identify unusual behaviour, while common payment references and agreed data standards can improve traceability across providers.
I would argue for a shared, privacy-conscious approach to payment intelligence, where participating financial institutions exchange defined fraud-risk signals and transaction status information without exposing customers’ complete financial histories.
Such cooperation would not eliminate fraud. It could make suspicious activity easier to recognise across participating systems and reduce the information gaps that criminals exploit.
Critics may argue that forcing payment providers to connect more closely could undermine commercial incentives or create shared cybersecurity risks. Those concerns are legitimate. Interoperability requires strong security controls, clear liability arrangements and independent oversight.
But protecting competition should not mean protecting fragmentation. Financial institutions already compete while relying on shared infrastructure. The question is whether Africa can extend that cooperation without compromising customer protection or commercial independence.
I believe regulators must become more ambitious in how they measure fintech progress. Transaction volumes, wallet registrations and market valuations are useful indicators, but they should not dominate assessments of industry success.
We should be asking different questions. What percentage of payments reach their intended recipients? How quickly are failed transactions reversed? What does a cross-border transfer actually cost the customer? How effectively can providers investigate fraud when a transaction moves between networks?
These are the measures that reveal whether financial technology is solving real economic problems.
African regulators and payment operators should establish common standards for transaction tracking, dispute resolution, settlement transparency and secure information exchange. Fintech companies should compete on the quality of services they provide, not on their ability to isolate customers from competing networks.
Africa has already demonstrated that it can build successful digital financial products. The next test is whether it can build a financial system in which those products work together.
I do not believe the future belongs to the company that convinces every African to open another wallet. It belongs to the companies and institutions that make the wallet a customer chooses increasingly irrelevant to whether a payment succeeds.
The next generation of African fintech should be judged by the connections it creates, not the barriers it persuades customers to accept.
Oluoma Onyeukwa is a finance and banking operations professional with interests in financial technology, data science, fraud prevention and digital payment infrastructure.