Has Mobile Money Outgrown Its Own Infrastructure?
June 24th 2026
Mobile money transformed financial access across Africa, but the platforms it built are now exposing a deeper infrastructural problem.
When M-PESA launched in Kenya in 2007, the problem it was solving was straightforward: millions of people had no access to formal financial services, but most had a mobile phone. The solution was elegant in its simplicity—use the phone as the wallet. Within years, mobile money had spread across the continent, and the story of Africa’s financial transformation was being told through the lens of the platforms that made it possible.
Africa now dominates mobile money, processing 74% of global transactions—USD 1.1 trillion in 2024 alone, with over 1.1 billion registered accounts. However, beneath those headline figures lies a growing and consequential tension: the transactional ambitions of mobile money have far outpaced the physical, regulatory, and protocol infrastructure that was built to carry them.
The USSD Bottleneck
To understand the infrastructure problem, the industry must acknowledge USSD (unstructured supplementary service data). This is the technological backbone of mobile money across most of Sub-Saharan Africa. USSD remains the most used channel for mobile financial services in Africa, handling over 70% of mobile money interactions in 2024. USSD was designed in the 1990s as a session-based, request-response protocol for feature phones. It was never engineered for the transaction volumes, complexity, or security demands now being placed upon it.
The protocol is stateless by design, meaning each session is ephemeral and has no native memory, no encryption at the transport layer, and a hard 182-character message size limit. Yet the USSD segment captured 63.5% of total transaction volume in the African mobile money market in 2024. The continent is attempting to run a 21st-century financial system on a communications protocol that predates Google. The same simplicity that made USSD the democratizing gateway for financial inclusion is now the ceiling capping what mobile money can become.
From Simple Transfers to Complex Ecosystems
Modern consumer requirements have added a layer of technical complexity that the original infrastructure was never designed to support. Today, a single transaction on an integrated mobile money platform may pass through multiple APIs, cross banking system boundaries, interact with insurance or credit providers, and settle across currency zones. However, the underlying architecture has not kept pace.
As platforms like M-PESA, MTN MoMo, and Airtel Money evolve from simple peer-to-peer transfers into layered financial products—micro-insurance, merchant payments, trade finance, SACCO integrations—they require richer data channels and more reliable uptime than 2G USSD sessions can reliably provide. A system disbursing micro-loans or processing insurance claims cannot afford a dropped session mid-transaction. Both buyers and sellers depend heavily on stable mobile networks, and any system outages or disruptions can significantly impact e-commerce, making reliable infrastructure a critical factor as mobile money continues to evolve.
One of the clearest signs of this infrastructure gap is interoperability. As mobile money platforms scaled, they did so as closed-loop systems. A customer on one network could not easily transact with a customer on another. This was commercially logical for the operators involved, but it produced a structural fragmentation that directly undermined the financial inclusion mission these platforms were built to advance. Cross-border interoperability across Africa remains inconsistent, with many digital payment solutions still unable to interoperate with each other—and even less so across borders.
Progress has been made in markets like Tanzania and Ghana, where regulatory intervention has driven cross-platform interoperability between competing operators. But across borders, the picture remains inconsistent. Mobile money exposed the demand for seamless regional payments. It has not yet produced the infrastructure to deliver them at scale.
PAPSS and the Infrastructure That Could Close the Gap
That is precisely why the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) matters. By enabling cross-border payments in local African currencies, PAPSS addresses a structural weakness that mobile money platforms, for all their innovation, cannot solve independently. A payment routed through PAPSS no longer needs to travel via New York or London, shedding foreign exchange fees and days of processing time along the way.
For the goals of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), this is not a peripheral concern. Trade integration depends on payment integration. And payment integration depends on shared infrastructure—the APIs, settlement rails, and interoperability standards that sit beneath every transaction.
Telecom operators, banks, fintech firms, and regulators are increasingly collaborating not just on products, but on standards, agreeing on common API frameworks, shared data protocols, and unified settlement architectures. Digital public infrastructure built on open APIs is enabling telecom operators, fintech firms, and startups to build new services without duplicating foundational infrastructure.
The Future of Mobile Money in Africa
Mobile money’s achievement is real and lasting. It brought formal financial services to millions of people who had never had access to them, and it did so faster and more effectively than any conventional banking model.
As analysis of Africa’s fintech and mobile money growth has made clear, the rapid adoption of digital financial solutions also exposes both consumers and service providers to increasing cybersecurity risks that grow in proportion to how interconnected the infrastructure becomes.
The immediate priorities are clear: expanding reliable network coverage, accelerating interoperability through frameworks like PAPSS, harmonizing regulatory requirements across borders, and transitioning away from USSD dependency toward more capable open API architectures.
Without these foundational upgrades, platforms risk hitting hard ceilings on transaction capacity, security resilience, and product complexity. For African telcos and ICT policymakers, the work ahead is less about innovation and more about ensuring that the infrastructure already carrying billions of dollars in daily transactions is built to handle the next decade of growth reliably and securely.
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