Ilyas Berrajaa, Managing Director Africa, BPC Banking Technologies.
A farmer selling produce outside a town market, a minibus operator collecting fares, a pharmacy in a rural district, or a small shop owner serving a cash-based community often has the same challenge: Consumers increasingly rely on digital payment instruments like mobile wallets, but merchants still have no seamless way to accept them.
The future of financial inclusion in Africa will not be defined by the number of bank branches, but by the reach of digital acceptance networks. These networks must be affordable, interoperable, and capable of serving informal merchants, rural service points, transport ecosystems, and community-based commerce.
The inclusion gap is becoming an acceptance gap
Financial access has improved, but usage remains uneven. According to the World Bank Global Findex 2025, 58.2% of adults in Sub-Saharan Africa had an account in 2024, up from 49.3% in 2021. Mobile money is a major driver, with 40% of adults holding a mobile money account. Yet only 19.5% of adults made a digital merchant payment in 2024.
GSMA’s State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money 2025 reported that mobile money processed around 108 billion transactions globally in 2024, worth more than USD 1.68 trillion. Africa accounted for USD 1.1 trillion of mobile money transaction value and nearly 82 billion transactions, according to Making Finance Work for Africa’s summary of GSMA data.
From a regulatory perspective, African governments are aligning with financial inclusion objectives. In Nigeria, the Central Bank has advanced inclusion through agent banking expansion, POS oversight, and broader payment system reforms. In Ethiopia, the National Bank’s digital payments strategy emphasizes interoperability, inclusion, and a progressive shift toward a more cash-lite economy. In Mauritius, the Bank of Mauritius has introduced MauCAS QR as a national interoperable standard for merchant payments. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the national financial inclusion strategy targets an increase in inclusion from 38.5% in 2022 to 65% by 2028. Across regions from north to south and east to west the direction is clear: digital payment rails are being designed to reach the last mile of commerce.
Modern solutions that can turn the tide
Traditional acquiring was built around formal merchant ecosystems, POS infrastructure, card schemes, and predictable settlement flows. It is designed for regulated, banked merchants with stable operations and standardized onboarding processes. However, it is far less suited to fragmented and underserved segments such as informal traders, micro-merchants, service kiosks, transport operators, and community-based commerce, where transaction sizes are small, documentation is limited, and hardware investment is constrained.
Terminal onboarding, maintenance, certification and merchant servicing can make small merchants unprofitable before they process their first transaction. SoftPOS, merchant payment solutions, instant payments are modern tools that allow banks to turn merchants and mobile devices into practical access points for financial inclusion.
SoftPOS turning the phone into an acceptance point
A micro-merchant, delivery driver or small trader does not need to wait for a terminal to be ordered, shipped, configured and maintained. With SoftPOS, a compatible smartphone can accept contactless card and wallet payments without a dedicated POS device.
For acquirers, this lowers deployment cost and speeds up merchant activation in hard-to-reach areas. For SMEs, it removes hardware dependency and supports acceptance in daily commerce: shops, markets, delivery services, events and mobile businesses.
The World Bank Global Findex 2025 shows that mobile phone ownership in Sub-Saharan Africa is much higher than formal digital merchant payment usage. World Bank research on digital payment acceptance also notes that mobile-phone-based payment services and lower-cost technologies can help merchants leapfrog traditional card acceptance infrastructure. SoftPOS fits this pattern, as it brings acceptance to a device many merchants already understand.
Yet SoftPOS is not a universal answer. Smartphone access, connectivity, merchant education and transaction trust still matter. But it gives banks a practical route into segments previously too small or too expensive for traditional POS.
Merchant payment solutions for faster network expansion
For financial institutions, inclusion is not achieved only by providing merchants an acceptance payment instrument. It also requires the right tools to onboard, manage, support, and grow merchant networks at scale.
This matters because the merchant base is highly fragmented. CGAP noted in 2025 that over 95% of Sub-Saharan Africa’s MSMEs are micro-enterprises and more than 80% operate informally. These businesses need simple onboarding, clear pricing, instant visibility of transactions, and easy access to payment tools that work across physical and digital channels.
Modern merchant payment infrastructure help banks manage merchant onboarding, payment acceptance, settlements, reconciliation, pricing and servicing from one operational layer. Self-service channels, such as a merchant mobile app and an acquiring web portal, can centralize everything merchants require while equipping the bank with the tools needed to manage the full merchant lifecycle.
This includes QR acceptance, payment links, invoice payments, full transaction history, refunds, receipts and exportable reports. For bank acquirers, it includes sub-merchant management, role-based access control, maker-checker approval workflows, dispute management, scheduled reports and bulk file upload.
QR and instant payments as low-cost rails for daily commerce
Interoperability also is critical. A merchant should not need separate acceptance arrangements for every wallet, bank app or payment provider. AfricaNenda’s SIIPS 2025 report shows 36 instant payment systems live across 31 African countries, processing 64 billion transactions worth nearly USD 2 trillion in 2024.
QR payments and instant payment rails can bring digital acceptance to merchants that may never install a card terminal as it is too expensive. Static and dynamic QR codes and real-time account-to-account payments allow low-value secure transactions to move payments instantly, often at lower cost than card-based models.
Establishment of nationwide QR payments can help in that. Utilising standardised payment methods, certified and approved on the higher level, a small merchant, public service provider, biller or transport operator can accept digital payments without integrating with every institution separately. Request-to-Pay adds another layer of value: merchants, utilities, schools, public bodies and small businesses can send a payment request that the customer approves from a bank or wallet app, supporting controlled, transparent and traceable payments without forcing customers jump straight from easy familiar cash into complex payment journeys.
Importance of technology for financial inclusion expansion
To scale inclusive acquiring, financial institutions need more than front-end acceptance. They need a protected, future-ready technology layer behind it: compliant with local regulation, certified for schemes where required, interoperable with national payment systems, and capable of supporting onboarding, risk controls, settlement, reconciliation, disputes and reporting.
This is where many acquiring strategies break down. Merchants are contracted before the operating model is fully in place. The outcome is fragmented onboarding, manual servicing, settlement pressure, limited visibility, and elevated operational risk. And this is where BPC comes in. BPC’s cloud-native SmartVista platform supports financial institutions, processors and national payment operators in building payment ecosystems that advance financial inclusion. Its capabilities include merchant acquiring, merchant apps with instant digital onboarding, merchant portals, SoftPOS enablement, QR and instant payment integration, switching, settlement, reconciliation and operational monitoring.
In Somalia, BPC supported national payment infrastructure with instant payment and SOMQR capabilities. Somali consumers can make instant transfers via mobile or banking apps and complete QR-based transactions by authenticating with a PIN or OTP. Merchants generate a QR code that customers scan, with transactions routed through SmartVista. Seven banks joined the Somalia Instant Payment System after launch, with more banks and mobile money operators expected to integrate.
In Ethiopia, BPC supported EthSwitch’s national instant payment infrastructure. Powered by SmartVista, EthioPay-IPS enables account-to-account and wallet-to-wallet transfers, ETHQR, Request-to-Pay, alias-based payments and e-mandates. EthSwitch now connects 32 banks, 12 MFIs, three PSOs and three PIIs, providing modern card-switch hosting, centralised automated reconciliation, and shared wallet services to its members. EthSwitch has surpassed one million EthioPay-IPS transactions in a single day, with total value exceeding ETB 5 billion.
In Tunisia, Société Monétique Tunisie uses SmartVista as a consolidated national switch and merchant acquiring platform, replacing a legacy environment. The platform supports centralised acquiring, issuing and network operations, connecting 21 local banks and 6 African banks with consistent settlement, reconciliation and monitoring. It has also improved transparency across transaction flows, authorisations and interbank relations.
In Mauritius, State Bank of Mauritius modernised its cards and payments business with SmartVista, unifying issuing and acquiring, enabling Mastercard and Visa acceptance, integrating with MauCAS, and supporting payments across ATM, POS and e-commerce. Merchant management and loyalty capabilities strengthened its acquiring footprint, while daily transactions rose by around 40% over five years.
Future of financial inclusion in Africa
Africa has made significant progress in financial inclusion, but the next phase is fundamentally about usage. Accounts, wallets, and instant payment rails must be anchored in merchant ecosystems where customers can spend, receive, save, and build meaningful transaction histories.
Modern merchant acquiring should therefore be reframed as a core distribution strategy for inclusive banking rather than a standalone payments function. SoftPOS materially lowers the cost of acceptance. Merchant mobile applications and web portals enable institutions to scale and manage networks efficiently. QR-based and instant payment solutions embed digital payments into everyday commerce. Robust onboarding, reconciliation, and operational controls ensure that this growth remains both scalable and controlled.
For African banks, the real opportunity lies in the next frontier of financial inclusion—one that will not be captured by account opening alone, but by making those accounts actively usable in the everyday contexts where people pay, get paid, trade, travel, and live.
