PAPSS: How Africa's Pan-African Payment System Works

Paying a supplier in Ghana or Kenya from Tunisia usually means converting dinars into euros or dollars, routing the money through correspondent banks outside Africa and converting it again at the other end. The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) was built to cut out that detour. Tunisia's central bank joined in 2024, so the question for Tunisian banks, exporters and fintechs is what the system can actually do for them.

What PAPSS is

PAPSS is a financial market infrastructure developed by Afreximbank, the African Export-Import Bank, with the African Union and the secretariat of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). It was announced in Niamey in July 2019 and launched in Accra on 13 January 2022, starting with a pilot in West African countries.

Its goal is simple: let a person or company in one African country pay someone in another in their own currency, with the conversion and settlement handled inside Africa. Afreximbank's president estimated it could save more than $5 billion a year in payment costs, as reported by Afrique IT News at the time of Tunisia's accession.

How PAPSS works

According to PAPSS's own description, the system rests on three processes:

• Instant payment. A sender instructs their bank in local currency. PAPSS runs validation and sanctions checks and forwards the payment, and the receiving bank credits the beneficiary in their local currency. PAPSS says payments are processed within 120 seconds, 24 hours a day.
• Pre-funding. Direct participants fund a settlement account through their central bank's real-time gross settlement (RTGS) system before they can send payments. Smaller institutions can join indirectly through a sponsoring bank.
• Net settlement. Once a day, currently at 11:00 UTC, PAPSS calculates each central bank's net position. Central banks settle in local currency, and Afreximbank settles the matching hard-currency positions on accounts it holds for central banks.

The key point is netting. Instead of each payment requiring its own dollar or euro transfer, only the net balance between countries is settled in hard currency at the end of the day. PAPSS claims this can reduce foreign exchange needs by up to 80%.

How far it has spread

PAPSS has grown steadily, though from a low base. When Tunisia joined in February 2024, the BCT said the network had 108 participants, including 12 central banks and 96 commercial banks, according to Webmanagercenter.

In a September 2026 statement published by Zawya, PAPSS said it now covered:

• more than 30 African countries, about 10 of which joined in 2026;
• 24 national and regional central banks;
• more than 200 commercial banks and payment service providers;
• 16 national payment switches.

It also reported that transaction volumes rose by about 1,000% and values by about 120% compared with the same period of 2025. PAPSS does not publish absolute volumes or values in that statement, so these growth rates are hard to interpret.

Other products are being added. A PAPSS card was launched in June 2025, and the African Currency Marketplace, launched in July 2025, aims to let institutions exchange African currencies directly rather than through dollars, according to AllBusiness.Africa.

What has slowed adoption

Connecting banks is not the same as getting traders to use the system. Several obstacles have been documented:

• Paperwork. In Nigeria, heavy foreign exchange documentation was the main barrier for small businesses until the central bank eased rules in April 2025.
• Coverage. Many African countries are still not connected, so a corridor works only if both sides are live.
• Awareness. PAPSS itself says its next phase, from 2027, will focus on customer awareness and priority corridors.
• Informal markets. Where official exchange rates differ from parallel markets, traders may keep using informal channels.

Tunisia's place in PAPSS

The Central Bank of Tunisia (BCT) signed its accession in February 2024, in the presence of the trade minister and PAPSS and Afreximbank executives. Afreximbank described it as the first accession by a North African central bank. The BCT presented it as a way to deepen Tunisia's integration under the AfCFTA, which Tunisia joined in July 2020, and to offer exporters a faster and cheaper alternative. In 2022, the BCT had already joined Buna, the Arab regional payment system.

In May 2024, according to Managers, the BCT said that banks participating in its RTGS system and La Poste (Office national des postes) could become direct participants, provided they obtain a no-objection certificate from the BCT. We could not find public data on how many Tunisian institutions are live on PAPSS, or on Tunisian transaction volumes.

What it means for Tunisian businesses and fintechs

For Tunisian firms, PAPSS is mostly a bank-level tool. Its usefulness depends on three things:

• Bank connections. An exporter can only use PAPSS if its bank, and its client's bank, are connected. Asking your bank is the first step.
• FX rules. Payments in local currency still fall under Tunisia's exchange regulations. The planned reform of the foreign exchange code will matter as much as the infrastructure.
• Fintech access. PAPSS now connects payment service providers and switches, not only banks. Over time, that could let Tunisian payment institutions offer African payouts, linked to domestic instant payments.

PAPSS is one of several answers to Africa's cross-border problem, alongside private gateways and stablecoins. Our article on AfCFTA, digital trade and payments puts it in the wider trade context.