How PAPSS and Buna are building Africa-Arab payment infrastructure
Two regional payment platforms are building the rails for a new financial geography connecting Africa and the Arab world. On the African side, the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), launched by Afreximbank, enables cross-border transactions in local African currencies, bypassing the correspondent banking routes that typically run through New York or London. On the Arab side, the Buna platform, operated by the Arab Monetary Fund, functions as a multi-currency payment and settlement system designed to serve Arab and neighboring markets.
Each platform was built independently to address similar structural problems: high transaction costs, slow settlement, and dependence on external financial infrastructure. But as trade and remittance flows between Africa and the Gulf deepen, the case for connecting these two systems grows more pressing. The question is no longer whether integration is desirable, but how fast institutional momentum can build.
Remittance costs and the Africa-Gulf integration case
The economic stakes are substantial. According to World Bank data, remittance inflows to Sub-Saharan Africa amount to tens of billions of dollars each year. Egypt alone, one of the region’s largest recipients, has historically received tens of billions in annual remittances, with a major share originating from workers in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Kuwait. A significant portion of these flows still travels through costly legacy channels.
The World Bank has documented that Sub-Saharan Africa consistently pays the highest remittance transaction costs of any global region, often exceeding 7 to 8 percent per transaction on certain corridors. Reducing those costs by even a few percentage points would translate into hundreds of millions of dollars annually returned to African households rather than absorbed by intermediaries. For migrant workers in the Gulf, many employed in construction and domestic services, the difference registers directly on monthly budgets.
Cross-border trade compounds this dynamic. Analyses from UNCTAD and regional development banks have consistently shown that GCC-Africa trade volumes grew throughout the decade preceding 2024, spanning food imports, energy, construction materials, and manufactured goods. As volumes rise, businesses on both sides increasingly demand faster, cheaper settlement options. The current architecture, which typically routes payments through third-country correspondent banks, adds both cost and time that erodes competitiveness.
Mobile money growth and the financial sovereignty case for integration
The convergence of technology trends on both sides of the corridor creates a distinctive opening. African mobile money ecosystems have reached real scale: Kenya and Ghana, among others, report that a majority of adults now hold mobile money accounts, with transaction volumes in some markets representing a significant share of GDP. Across the Gulf, digital payment adoption has accelerated under national payment modernization programs, and consumer expectations for speed and frictionless access have risen sharply.
This technical maturity shifts the conversation about Afro-Arab payment integration from aspiration toward implementation. PAPSS gives African central banks a mechanism to settle transactions in local currencies, reducing exposure to dollar fluctuations and the geopolitical risks tied to Western-controlled clearinghouses. Buna offers Arab economies an analogous layer of sovereignty over regional settlement. Connecting the two would extend this logic to cross-regional trade: a Senegalese exporter and an Emirati importer could, in principle, settle in their own currencies without routing through a third-country bank.
The sovereignty argument resonates in both regions for reasons that extend beyond fintech. Discussions about reducing dollar dependence in trade, reforming the global financial architecture, and building regional alternatives to correspondent banking have been active in both African and Arab policy circles. Payments integration sits at the practical core of these ambitions, giving technical projects a political weight that helps sustain institutional support.
Private fintech companies in Africa-Gulf payment corridors
While institutional platforms develop their frameworks, private fintech companies are already operating in the corridors that PAPSS and Buna aim to serve. Startups across West and East Africa facilitate remittances from the Gulf, competing on speed, mobile-first design, and lower fees compared to traditional money transfer operators. Middle Eastern payment gateways have begun targeting African merchant traffic as e-commerce volumes expand.
These private actors have a dual relationship with regional institutional rails. On one hand, platforms like PAPSS can provide settlement infrastructure that lowers the cost and complexity of running cross-border payment services, potentially enabling smaller fintechs to compete more effectively against incumbents. On the other hand, connecting private and institutional systems requires regulatory alignment. Central banks in both regions must establish frameworks governing how licensed fintechs access regional settlement layers, and how consumer protections apply across jurisdictions.
For entrepreneurs building in this space, the regulatory landscape matters at least as much as the technology stack. Founders of remittance platforms serving Gulf-to-Africa corridors consistently cite licensing complexity and currency controls as the primary constraints on growth, often more limiting than technical challenges. Progress on harmonized regulatory frameworks between African and Arab central banks would therefore have direct and immediate commercial consequences for the companies building in these corridors.
The long-term stakes of Afro-Arab payment integration
The long-term significance of Afro-Arab payment integration extends beyond efficiency gains for individual transactions. It represents a structural shift in how two regions with deep demographic and commercial ties manage financial sovereignty, and in how much value local actors can capture from cross-border flows rather than ceding it to external intermediaries.
Whether PAPSS and Buna converge formally, through a bilateral interoperability agreement between Afreximbank and the Arab Monetary Fund, or more gradually through shared technical standards and private-sector bridges, the direction of travel is clear. Each new corridor agreement, regulatory alignment, or commercial partnership narrows the distance between two platforms that were designed for distinct regions but increasingly serve the same flows.
For entrepreneurs, central bankers, and institutional architects building on these rails, the opportunity is real and the infrastructure is still taking shape. The actors who define the interoperability layer today will hold an outsized position in the regional payments economy for years to come.