How African Innovation is Reshaping Treasury and Payments
Published: November 03, 2025
Innovation is transforming the way that money moves across the continent. Alistair Lindsay, Head, International Coverage (UK and Europe), Absa Securities UK, explores how African economies are leapfrogging legacy infrastructure altogether, offering lessons for treasurers worldwide.
Africa’s financial innovation has been on a remarkable journey over the past 20 years. In Sub-Saharan Africa, limited physical banking infrastructure once created a critical chasm in access to financial services. Yet today, the region is the epicentre of global mobile money, home to 1.1 billion of the world’s 2 billion registered mobile money accounts in 2024, according to GSMA.
What was once seen as a constraint has become a catalyst, allowing African markets to adopt digital-first solutions at speed and scale.
The continent has transformed much of its financial ecosystem, built around mobile phones, cloud-based infrastructure, and innovative partnerships between banks, fintechs, telecoms providers, and governments.
The recently released Absa African Financial Markets Index (AFMI), now in its ninth year, provides vital data on Africa’s financial market development. We produce this annual report in partnership with the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum (OMFIF), scoring 29 African countries’ financial development to provide a benchmark for market infrastructure. Progress on financial market development continues to be made across the continent, with standout examples in FX reforms and improved product diversity.
Africa’s experience shows how innovation flourishes when necessity and opportunity collide. And while retail banking has led this revolution, its lessons are increasingly relevant for treasurers navigating fast-changing markets.
‘Retail-spiration’ for treasurers
Retail financial services, and the leaps and bounds made in this sector, have spearheaded this transformation. Mobile wallets – once used mainly for remittances – are now vital for wage distribution, bill payments, and savings. In Kenya, for instance, innovations such as M-PESA (a mobile phone-based money transfer, payments, and micro-financing service) have brought tens of millions of people into the formal financial system via their smartphones, offering services like microloans and payroll solutions.
The platform has also transformed aid distribution by reaching last-mile beneficiaries directly, further enhancing financial inclusion and empowering these individuals to live with dignity and independence. More than 84% of Kenyan adults now have formal access to financial services, compared with just 26% in 2006.
For corporate treasurers, these retail innovations offer both a source of inspiration and new possibilities. The same tools that transformed access for individuals can be adapted to streamline corporate finance.
Mobile wallets, for example, allow companies to pay workers who lack bank accounts securely and instantly, while the digital footprints left by these transactions also generate vast pools of data. When coupled with AI and analytics, these data insights can be used to enhance liquidity planning, fraud detection, and working capital management.
Oftentimes, the data is so rich that its use-cases extend beyond treasury and can even support clients with commercial decision-making. In many respects, corporates are learning from the grassroots of Africa’s retail finance reckoning.
Investment flows but complexity grows
This innovation coincides with a surge of inward investment interest flowing towards the continent, particularly from Europe and the UK, where subdued domestic growth is pushing corporates and investors to seek higher returns abroad.
Africa’s rapid urbanisation, growing middle class, and wealth of natural resources make it increasingly attractive for international investors. The relative stability of many key African markets in recent years means that many international corporates are exploring new opportunities in infrastructure and capital expenditure.
For treasurers, this brings both opportunity and a new layer of complexity, including managing cash flows across multiple regulatory environments, currencies, and levels of financial market maturity. These challenges require agility and deep local knowledge to navigate.
Leapfrogging into treasury’s future
One of Africa’s major advantages is the speed with which digital solutions can scale. Without being tied by legacy infrastructure, the continent can essentially ‘leapfrog’, meaning corporates can adopt new technologies more quickly, using mobile platforms for payroll, supplier payments, or liquidity management that would take months to embed elsewhere.
South Africa remains at the regional centre for many international treasury operations, equipped with the personnel, infrastructure, and regulatory depth needed to support complex corporate structures.
This makes it the natural anchor for multinationals seeking to expand across the continent. Meanwhile, markets such as Kenya are positioning themselves as frontier hubs. Kenya is actively investing in digital infrastructure, including data centres and green power projects.
Just one example is the plan for a $1bn geothermal-powered data centre in Kenya, as part of a collaboration between Microsoft and AI development firm G42 to boost green technology infrastructure in Africa. The country’s willingness to embrace innovation positions it as a place to build capacity for next-generation treasury systems.
This year’s AFMI also shows how African countries are addressing inefficient FX regimes, helping to boost investor confidence and market credibility. For example, the Bank of Uganda rolled out extensive reforms that liberalised the FX market, raised reporting standards, and improved interbank liquidity, while the Central Bank of Nigeria has also unified various FX windows and cleared a $7bn backlog. These types of reforms are crucial for lowering transaction costs and facilitating smoother cross-border trade.
Alongside these digital innovations, blockchain is also emerging as a transformative tool for cross-border treasury operations.
While it’s still an evolving space, it has the potential to offer enormous efficiencies when it comes to scale and lowering the cost of moving money between markets. But adoption must be closely linked to regulatory oversight; regulators need to weigh blockchain’s efficiencies against the risk of ‘retrospective regulation’ – especially in jurisdictions where central banks are still defining their stance on digital currencies.
Global treasury operations playbook
Africa’s financial ecosystem is a duality: mature and globally integrated in some areas, and dynamic and fast-growing in others. For corporates and treasury teams worldwide, the takeaway should be that innovation born of necessity can deliver scalable, digital-first solutions that outpace more developed markets. Engaging with this ecosystem offers both opportunity and foresight into the future of treasury.