Mastercard is arguing that security, not just expanding access, will determine whether Africa's digital economy lives up to its growth projections, in a piece for Forbes Africa written by the company's Division President for Africa, Gabriel Swanepoel. Mastercard-commissioned research from Genesis Analytics projects Africa's digital payments economy could reach $1.5 trillion by 2030, building on a decade in which the company says it helped bring a billion people into the financial mainstream across the continent.
The piece points to a less celebrated trend running alongside that growth: annual financial losses from cybercrime on the continent doubled to an estimated $5 billion in 2025, according to figures cited from INTERPOL's 2026 Africa cyber-crime report and the World Economic Forum's Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026. Cyber-enabled attacks reportedly account for more than 30 percent of reported crime in parts of Western and Eastern Africa, and roughly seven in ten CEOs across sub-Saharan Africa say they face shortages of cybersecurity talent.
Mastercard says its own network processed 175 billion transactions in 2025, with its Decision Intelligence Pro fraud-detection system improving accuracy by up to 300 percent and its African merchant acceptance network expanding 45 percent over the year, figures the company is citing as evidence for its broader argument: that building security into digital payment systems from the start, rather than retrofitting it later, is what will let Africa's digital economy actually reach the scale the company's own projections describe.