Past the Headlines: The Payment Problems Nobody Breaks Down

Article 5 of the Past the Headlines series on making Africa actionable as a market

If you are new to this series, the premise is simple: we take one recurring claim about Africa and ask what it actually means on the ground, because the gap between the headline and the reality is where the interesting work is.

This week's claim is the most repeated one of all: cash is king.

It has the distinction of being both completely true and almost completely useless. In Morocco, cash sits at roughly 77% of transactions. Cash dominance appears in every market report and every entry strategy ever written about this region. What we have not seen yet is the problem broken down far enough to build solutions on, the kind that would add up to a more trustworthy system and a more trustworthy relationship between the people transacting in it.

Morocco's payment stack and its frictions

Morocco has over 21 million bank cards in circulation. The overwhelming majority of card activity is cash withdrawal at an ATM, not payment. A meaningful share of those cards were issued as cash-access instruments and were never enabled for online transactions at all, a fact most cardholders themselves do not know. Which means a share of what every report records as "COD preference" is actually customers holding cards that would fail at checkout, without the customer, the merchant or the report's author being aware of it.

That single decomposed detail changes the entire object of study. "Consumers prefer cash" is a demand-side story that ends in awareness campaigns. "A share of consumers hold payment instruments that cannot perform the behaviour being measured" is a supply-side story that ends in activation work. Same 77%, opposite conclusions.

We broke this stack down layer by layer last week, from the merchant's side, in our piece on why Moroccan customers don't prepay. This week the point is different. The point is the pattern: what it takes to get from a headline everyone repeats to a structure someone can work on.

Four frictions, and what each one hides

We gathered four explanations for why cash is still king.

Moroccan cards are not ready for online payment. With cards issued mainly for cash withdrawal, banks have not updated their products to include other features, including online payments. Some banks even request a written letter and a notarised document to enable digital payments, despite the option being available in the app.

The bureaucracy involved in offering an online checkout. A great deal of Moroccan commerce has no online checkout at all. All the online processes to validate a business still run on paper. It takes time to gather the dossier, and more time for banks to review it. While we are used to completing KYB and financial requirements online, in Morocco you have to apply in person. That partially explains why serious, high-volume merchants run their entire business through WhatsApp and Instagram. The headline files this under immaturity and moves on. Look closer and the picture inverts. These merchants have working payment collection, working customer relationships, working logistics and real margins. What they lack is one specific piece of infrastructure whose absence has so far cost them less than adopting it would. That is a cost-benefit calculation that has been answered correctly, and it will change when the benefit side changes, not when someone calls them behind.

The card declines, especially on international cards. The behaviour is unreliable and the messaging is inconsistent. Banks still run on high-risk transaction labels for online payments. Often you get no decline message at all, and then see the amount debited from your account.

Trust, in the system and in the people. Trust is not a lever anyone can pull. Trust is an outcome. You do not fix it with a campaign, a certification badge or a tournament. What you can build are mechanisms that make its absence cheap to live with: the right to inspect before paying, partial deposits, instant confirmation visible to both parties, refund promises specific enough to be believed. Cash on delivery is precisely such a mechanism, and Moroccan consumers built it themselves because nobody built them a better one. The work is not to talk people out of the protection they have. The work is to build protections good enough that the old one becomes optional, and then trust arrives on its own, as a consequence.

The examples to look up

Japan and the cashless vision

The 2030 World Cup is coming, the infrastructure push is real, and the argument goes that readiness will force the change. This is good news, and it is an opportunity to look back on other examples of how change happens.

The Japanese story is instructive. In 2018, the Japanese government published a cashless vision explicitly built around the 2020 Olympics as a catalyst, targeting 40% cashless payment by 2025. Then the Games actually happened, and Japan's cashless ratio sat at roughly 30%. The event itself, in one of the wealthiest and most digitally sophisticated countries on earth, moved almost nothing.

What moved Japan came afterwards, and through entirely different means: standardised QR payments, obligatory rails, and above all point and cashback programmes that gave consumers a concrete, personal reason to switch. By 2025 the ratio had climbed to 58%, seven years after the vision document and four years after the Olympics were supposed to have done the job. Readers of last week's piece will recognise the mechanism. Japan did not persuade its consumers to go cashless. It paid them, in points, until the incentive gap closed.

The lesson for 2030 writes itself. Morocco will not flip the majority of transactions to online payment for its World Cup, because deadlines do not change payment behaviour; incentives and structures do, on a timeline of years, not tournaments. The event can serve as a coordination point for structural work. It cannot substitute for it, and nobody, anywhere, has ever changed how they pay in order to impress the visitors.

Brazil and the trust issues

Brazilian e-commerce spent years in the same conversation Morocco is having now: cash-adjacent instruments dominating, cards underused online, trust named in every report as the blocker, campaigns launched to educate consumers who stubbornly declined to be educated.

Then the behaviour moved, and it is worth being precise about what moved it. It was not persuasion, and it was not an event. It was infrastructure that made trust cheap: instant payment with confirmation visible to both sides at the moment of transaction, at zero cost, on rails everyone's bank was obliged to join. Nobody asked Brazilian consumers to trust first and transact second. The mechanism carried the risk, and the habit followed it within months, after a decade in which nothing else had worked.

Morocco's structures are its own. The lesson is the order of operations: decompose the named problem, build the mechanisms that reduce what distrust costs, and let behaviour respond to the structure rather than the slogan.

This, incidentally, is why the outsider-insider position matters and why this series exists. Someone who has only ever operated in Morocco swims in these structures and stops seeing them. Someone reading Morocco from abroad sees only the headline.

What to do with this

The map we are drawing has gaps. We will come back with more real-life examples on this topic, because this edition of Past the Headlines is a story still being written. If you have seen how this works for your own company, send us a message.