Mobile money services processed more than $2 trillion in transactions worldwide in 2025, a 23 per cent increase from 2024, according to the GSMA State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money 2026. Digital payments now reach far and wide. A new opinion piece asks who benefits when money moves.
Eva Nyamori, Global Chief Strategy Officer at CapitalPay International, argued in an article published Sept. 29, 2026, that Africa's visible digital economy—mobile money, digital banking, e-commerce platforms, fintech applications and online marketplaces—rests on a less visible layer: payment infrastructure. The question, she wrote, isn't just whether people can make digital payments. It's whether payment systems can connect to wider business and government systems.
Who Is Affected
Africa's economies aren't uniform. Many businesses operate informally, while consumers shift between cash and digital channels. Connectivity and financial access vary within and between countries. Nyamori wrote that digital payments alone can't resolve these challenges, though they can help connect economies.
She also stressed that there's no single African digital economy. Kenya's payments ecosystem has developed differently from Tanzania's, while South Sudan faces different institutional and economic conditions. Infrastructure, she argued, should reflect local realities while linking to wider financial systems.
The Policy Gap
Disconnected systems come at a cost. Nyamori wrote that when government processes rely on separate systems, transactions may pass through several administrative steps before officials reconcile and report them. Each manual step leaves room for delay, error or incomplete information. Digitising a payment is one step. Connecting it to the wider process is another.
Connected infrastructure could make a difference, she argued. Digital payments create transaction records, which can help businesses track and reconcile transactions. They can support more efficient government administration and visibility. They can also help consumers take part in formal economic activity.
Those gains aren't automatic, the article says. They depend on infrastructure, adoption, regulation, trust, and how systems are designed and implemented. Reaching them requires interoperability, appropriate regulation, security, trust and designs suited to African markets, Nyamori wrote. She said attention should extend beyond individual payment products to the systems that let payments work across wider economic processes.
An Industry Voice on Public Systems
Nyamori writes from inside the payments industry, and her argument rests on technology's promise. Yet the conditions she lists are largely public responsibilities. Regulation, security and trust aren't features a single company can provide on its own.
She noted that African technology companies working across multiple markets can draw on experience from different environments while adapting their work to local requirements. The objective, she wrote, should be to identify which principles can transfer and which need redesign.
Her closing point: Africa's digital economy will be built not only through phone applications but also through the infrastructure behind them. She framed the broader question around what happens when payments become part of the infrastructure connecting consumers, businesses, governments and financial institutions.
Why This Matters:
Mobile money's growth—more than $2 trillion in 2025—means more people and businesses now depend on payment systems they don't control. Nyamori's own list of conditions, including regulation, security, trust and interoperability, points to a role for public oversight. Without it, gains in visibility and efficiency may not reach the informal businesses and cash-reliant consumers she describes. Wider access to formal payment systems could broaden participation in the formal economy, but only if rules and design account for differences between countries. From a center-left view, the test is whether that infrastructure is built to include people, not just connect institutions that already have access.