Africa Is Open for Business, the Problem Is Getting Paid

Trade across the continent is growing faster than the systems built to support it. Six months into 2026 the gap between African trade ambition and African trade execution has never been more visible or more urgent.

Africa is doing something remarkable in 2026. It is trading more, reaching further and building commercial relationships across borders at a pace that would have seemed optimistic three years ago, and it is doing all of this while the infrastructure underneath it scrambles to keep up.

That tension, between an accelerating trade story and a payments system still catching its breath, is the defining business narrative of the first half of 2026 on the continent, and understanding it matters to every Nigerian entrepreneur, SME owner and business professional trying to operate beyond their domestic market.

The momentum is real and the numbers confirm it.

Africa's cross-border payments market is expected to triple by 2035, growing from $329 billion in 2025 to $1 trillion, driven by AfCFTA integration, e-commerce expansion and a fintech sector that has grown from 450 companies in 2022 to over 1,000 by 2024, and the Guided Trade Initiative that pilots AfCFTA's preferential rules has expanded from eight founding countries in 2022 to approximately 39 countries by mid-2025, with more than 40 nations now issuing AfCFTA Certificates of Origin that allow shipments to claim preferential tariff treatment at border posts.

Trade between South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania and the West African bloc continues to grow despite the obstacles, and the appetite for expansion is genuine, with businesses increasingly willing to pursue opportunities beyond their domestic markets in ways that the previous generation of African entrepreneurs rarely attempted at scale.

But here is where the second story begins.

Moving money across African borders in 2026 remains significantly more complex than moving it between Africa and London or New York, a paradox that Ola Oyetayo, CEO of global B2B payments firm Verto, described bluntly: businesses report that making payments to major international financial centres can be simpler than settling transactions within Africa itself.

The core problem is structural and has three parts.

The first is currency; Many African currency pairs have no liquid direct market, meaning a business converting Nigerian naira to Ethiopian birr has historically had to convert via dollar twice, naira to dollar then dollar to birr, with each conversion carrying a spread that adds cost and delays to every transaction, and several African currencies experienced 5 to 20 percent annual volatility against major currencies in 2024 and 2025, creating meaningful exchange rate risk for businesses with extended payment terms.

The second is speed; Traditional cross-border settlement timelines of three to seven business days create cash flow gaps that SMEs with limited working capital cannot easily absorb, tying up funds in transit at exactly the moments businesses need liquidity to fulfil orders, pay suppliers or take on new contracts.

The third is fragmentation; Regulatory requirements, compliance obligations and payment infrastructure vary so significantly from country to country that a business operating in five African markets effectively needs five different financial setups, a burden that falls disproportionately on smaller operators who cannot afford the teams that multinationals deploy to manage it.

Progress is being made and the most significant development is PAPSS, the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System, operated by Afrexim bank in partnership with the African Union and the AfCFTA Secretariat. As of early 2026 PAPSS connects 19 countries with over 160 connected commercial banks, enabling direct cross-border payments in local currencies that bypass the correspondent banking system and eliminate the dollar detour that currently adds between 2 and 5 percent to every intra-African transaction.

In June 2025 PAPSS launched the African Currency Marketplace, enabling direct settlements in African currencies and bypassing the dollar entirely, opening up hundreds of trade corridors that are currently virtually unusable due to the lack of functional direct currency pairs.

The ambition behind PAPSS is significant, intra-African trade is expected to increase from 18 to 50 percent of the continent's total trade annually by 2030 under AfCFTA goals, and PAPSS is positioned as the payment infrastructure that makes that expansion possible, but the remaining 35 African countries still require alternative routing, meaning the system's coverage, while growing, has not yet reached the scale that would make it the default rail for continental commerce.

Oyetayo's assessment of where this leaves businesses in the second half of 2026 is instructive: initiatives like PAPSS are a meaningful step, but right now it is the operators building the corridors who are setting the pace, not policy, and the businesses that will benefit most from the next phase of African trade growth will be those that can move capital efficiently across both regional and global markets without waiting for infrastructure to fully catch up before building what they need today.

Africa's trade story is one of the most compelling economic narratives on earth right now, a continent of 1.4 billion people and a combined GDP exceeding $3 trillion increasingly trading with itself, building supply chains that do not route through Europe and creating commercial relationships that compound into something larger than any single corridor suggests.

The systems are catching up - the businesses that succeed will be the ones that do not wait for them.

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Africa is open, Your money should be moving.

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