Data point
Registered mobile money accounts, Sub-Saharan Africa (millions)
Cumulative registered mobile money accounts in Sub-Saharan Africa, 2020 to 2022, as reported in GSMA's annual State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money
Source: GSMA State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money - Figures reflect the most recent GSMA SOTIR editions available to me this session; live web access was unavailable, so 2023 to 2026 updates are not included here and should be checked against the current GSMA SOTIR release before drawing conclusions about the present state of the market.
The scale-up is real
Mobile money in Sub-Saharan Africa is the clearest infrastructure success story in African fintech. GSMA’s annual State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money has tracked steady growth in registered accounts across the region for over a decade, and the trajectory through the early 2020s shows an acceleration rather than a plateau. Agents networks, telco-led distribution and low-cost feature-phone access solved the last-mile problem that traditional banking never did in most of the region.
That part of the story is well documented and repeatedly confirmed year over year. It is also the part that gets quoted most often in “Africa is leapfrogging into digital payments” narratives, because it is a clean, positive, easily citable number.
The part that gets skipped: settlement, not just access
Domestic mobile money adoption answers a different question than the one implied by “digital payment infrastructure” as a 2026 investment theme. Access to a mobile wallet inside one country is not the same as functioning, low-cost, interoperable settlement across African currencies and borders.
The most visible attempt to fix that is the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), built with the Africa Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) and endorsed by the African Union as settlement infrastructure for the African Continental Free Trade Area. PAPSS launched commercially in January 2022, but its initial live footprint was the West African Monetary Zone: Nigeria, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone and The Gambia, six countries out of 54. Afreximbank has publicly framed PAPSS’s potential benefit in terms of billions of dollars saved annually by cutting reliance on correspondent banks and hard-currency intermediation, but that is a projected benefit of full continental adoption, not a report of money already saved.
The gap between “mobile money reaches hundreds of millions of people” and “cross-border African payment rails are commercially mature” is exactly where a 2026 investment thesis needs to be precise. Domestic wallet growth is a demand-side signal. PAPSS-style interoperability is a supply-side infrastructure bet that depends on central bank participation, correspondent bank buy-in, and telco willingness to interconnect across borders, none of which scale as fast as a wallet sign-up.
Why the distinction matters for a thesis
A thesis built on “digital payment infrastructure in Africa” that cites mobile money account growth as its main evidence is citing the easy number, not the hard one. The number that would actually validate a 2026 infrastructure thesis is cross-border transaction volume and value settled through PAPSS or equivalent rails, expansion beyond the original six countries, and central bank/commercial bank onboarding rates. Those figures are not as widely reported, which is itself informative: infrastructure that is genuinely scaling produces frequent, specific, quantified disclosure. Infrastructure that is still in pilot phase produces press releases about intent and projected savings.
Countercase
The core risk in this note is that its own headline evidence, GSMA’s registered account figures, is not current. Live web verification was unavailable this session, so the chart reflects the most recent GSMA SOTIR data available to me rather than confirmed 2025 or 2026 figures. If mobile money growth has slowed, plateaued, or if PAPSS has meaningfully expanded beyond its original six-country footprint since 2022, this note understates the case for infrastructure maturity. A reader acting on this thesis should treat the account-growth chart as a lower bound on the historical record, not as evidence about the current state of the market.
There is also a selection-bias risk in the framing itself: choosing PAPSS as the proof point for “interoperability lag” assumes PAPSS is the right benchmark. Regional real-time payment systems such as Kenya’s M-Pesa cross-network interoperability, or East African Community payment initiatives, may show faster or slower progress than PAPSS and would change the picture. A single settlement scheme is not a full census of African payment interoperability, and treating it as representative risks narrative fallacy, a single vivid example standing in for a trend that has not been broadly measured.
Finally, registered accounts are not active accounts. GSMA’s own methodology distinguishes registered from 90-day active accounts, and the gap between the two has historically been large in several markets. A thesis that only cites registered-account growth without checking active-usage rates risks overstating actual payment infrastructure utilization.