A new rule requiring interoperable electronic-money transfers across West Africa's eight-nation monetary union to run through a shared instant-payments platform takes effect November 2, but fintech executives say the free pricing it promises for small transfers masks real costs still being absorbed somewhere in the system, according to a report by Forbes Africa. The Central Bank of West African States mandated that all interoperable transfers within the UEMOA bloc, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote d'Ivoire, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo, route through its PI-SPI platform, with transfers up to 8,000 CFA francs, about $13.66, free of charge, covering roughly 75 percent of the region's electronic-money transactions by volume.
The platform has scaled quickly since its September 2025 launch, connecting 175 participants serving more than 38 million people within a year. The region processed 11 billion electronic-money transactions in 2024, up 27 percent in volume, worth 160.4 trillion CFA francs, around $264.55 billion, giving a sense of the transaction volume the free-transfer tier now has to absorb. Payshiga Technologies CEO Oluwatobi Oseni said making transfers under 8,000 CFA francs free does not eliminate the underlying costs of switching, settlement, liquidity, fraud management and agent networks, it just moves who pays for them.
Kora Technologies CEO Dickson Nsofor said free small transfers are genuinely good for financial inclusion, but the real test is whether the pricing structure delivers savings that are actually passed through to users rather than absorbed elsewhere in provider margins. Verto's Nigeria country general manager Daniel Adeyemi Adeboyejo warned that provider revenue per transfer could decline unless transaction volumes grow enough to compensate for the new free tier, while Clea CEO Sheriff Adedokun summed up the skepticism bluntly, saying interoperability is not truly free once infrastructure, settlement, compliance and distribution costs are accounted for.