Afreximbank, PAPSS, and MPS unveiled PAPSSCARD – the first Pan-African card scheme aiming to make retail payments across African borders fast, secure, and affordable.
First presented on June 27 at the 32nd Afreximbank Annual Meetings in Abuja, PAPSSCARD is a joint project between the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank), the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) and Mercury Payment Services (MPS).
PAPSSCARD will act as a unified payment instrument on the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System, enabling users to make and receive card-based transactions in local currencies across participating African countries.
There are several benefits the card scheme participants will appreciate. By routing transactions through a local clearing network, PAPSSCARD reduces fees for online and point-of-sale payments, accelerates settlement, and promotes financial inclusion across underserved regions. Both authorization and settlement will happen in real-time through the PAPSS infrastructure. Besides, the card leverages EMV standards and tokenization to ensure transaction security and interoperability.
What’s important for the fintech players, PAPSSCARD is built on open-API architecture compliant with ISO 20022 messaging, facilitating easy integration for banks, gateways, and financial companies. The underlying PAPSS layer uses a distributed ledger–inspired hub-and-spoke model to provide real-time gross settlement with full transparency and the possibility of a seamless audit.
Although initial merchant and ATM acceptance may be limited while the network scales, the pan-African scheme offers multiple potential use cases. Thus, local merchants can sell their products and services cross-border within the continent without the need for multiple international card contracts, which significantly simplifies the billing process. Travelers and business professionals will also benefit from seamless payments in local currencies without FX markups or juggling multiple bank cards.
Furthermore, it is expected that PAPPSCARD will notably reduce the number of barriers to domestic trade in Africa, potentially decreasing the major share (80%) of the exports that African countries send outside the continent, not always on tariff-friendly terms.
At the same time, to reach its full potential, PAPSSCARD will need some time and governmental effort. Varying regulatory regimes across African countries can complicate uniform rollout. Besides, raising user awareness will require a broad-scale campaign, while initial system integration costs can slow adoption among smaller banks and retailers.
In today’s rapidly changing geopolitical landscape, many countries see traditional dependence on external payment systems as a major disadvantage and a crucial factor impeding national or regional resilience. In this respect, African countries stand out among other global economies.
As of 2021, about one-third of all purchase volume in the Middle East & Africa region was routed via domestic network cards, while roughly 67% were facilitated via global schemes like Visa and Mastercard. The global average for domestic card scheme use is much lower – minor 2%. Nevertheless, nearly half of all settlement processes within Africa still involve lenders outside the continent, so the issue of reliance on non-African infrastructure remains pressing and goes beyond cards.
The representatives of all three founding organizations stressed the importance of PAPSSCARD for Africa’s financial autonomy, control over local financial data, and practical affordability of payments for all stakeholders.
