Past the Headlines: What PAPSS Actually Changes for an African Exporter
Article 4 of the Past the Headlines series on making Africa actionable as a market
If you missed the earlier articles, the short version: this series takes one recurring claim about Africa and asks what it actually means on the ground. The goal is to fill in the gap between the headline and the reality, because that gap is where the interesting work is.
This one is about a piece of financial infrastructure you may not have heard of yet. It is called PAPSS. Unlike most things announced with great fanfare on this continent, it does something concrete and measurable. The challenge is the opposite here: almost nobody explains what that something actually is. So let us try to do that, using a real trade route that already exists: Morocco to Egypt.
What PAPSS is
PAPSS stands for the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System. It launched in Accra in January 2022, built by the African Export-Import Bank together with the African Union and the AfCFTA Secretariat. Morocco joined on 7 July 2025, with Bank Al-Maghrib signing on as the network's 17th country of presence, and by late 2025 the network spanned 19 countries, over 150 commercial banks, and 14 payment switches. Egypt is firmly on the network, and Cairo is where PAPSS keeps a significant presence.
PAPSS lets a business in one African country pay a business in another African country in local currency, without routing the money through a bank outside Africa and without converting it into dollars or euros along the way.
It sounds modest. But it is not. This has a direct impact on both time and cost: faster settlement and lower transaction fees. Let us understand how that happens, by comparing both scenarios.
The trade that already happens
Morocco and Egypt already trade. Bilateral trade reached around $1.1 billion in 2024, and the two governments recently held their fifth Joint Trade Committee, agreeing to remove customs and non-customs barriers and to coordinate under AfCFTA. So this is not a story about unlocking a market that did not exist. It is a story about what the transaction actually costs and how long it takes, which is the part the headline never mentions.
Picture a Moroccan producer selling a consignment of goods to a buyer in Cairo. The deal is agreed. Now the buyer has to pay, and here is where the friction lives.
Each link in that chain costs you something. It takes a fee or a spread for its service. It adds time, because each handoff is a separate processing step, often across time zones, which is how you get the multi-day wait. And it adds an extra currency conversion, because you go dirham to dollar and then dollar to pound, paying a margin on each leg rather than converting once. Industry estimates suggest more than 80% of cross-border African payments have historically been routed through correspondent banks outside the continent, and Sub-Saharan Africa remains the most expensive region in the world to move money, with costs well above the global average.
This is the quiet tax on intra-African trade. It is not a tariff, so it does not appear in any trade agreement. It is the plumbing. And it was rarely the paperwork that decided whether a corridor was worth running. It was this.
What changes with PAPSS
Now run the same transaction through PAPSS.
The Egyptian buyer instructs their local bank to pay in Egyptian pounds. That instruction goes to the Central Bank of Egypt, into PAPSS, which validates it, converts at a real-time rate, and forwards it to Bank Al-Maghrib in Morocco, which delivers dirhams into the seller's account. The money never leaves the continent. There is no correspondent bank in London or New York. There is no dollar leg in the middle.
The settlement happens in roughly two minutes rather than several days. The central banks settle the net balance between them at the end of the cycle, with Afreximbank acting as settlement agent, so an individual transaction does not need its own hard-currency leg at all. Across the continent, PAPSS is forecast to save more than $5 billion a year in payment costs that were previously lost to conversions and offshore routing.
For the exporter, three things change. The payment is faster, which frees up working capital sooner. The cost is lower, because the chain of intermediaries taking margins is gone. And the foreign exchange exposure shrinks, because the conversion is direct and near-instant rather than stretched across days.
How much does that actually save? Precise figures are hard to pin down, because the old route's fees and FX spreads are often opaque, which is part of the problem. But two things are well established. Settlement time drops from the 2 to 5 days typical of correspondent banking to roughly two minutes. And early participant banks cite cost reductions of up to around 50% per transaction, since a single conversion replaces two and the offshore intermediaries disappear. To put rough numbers on it, on a hypothetical $50,000 consignment the traditional route can quietly absorb $1,500 to $2,500 in fees, spreads, and float before the money lands. The exact dirham figure depends on your bank. The direction does not.
PAPSS does not create the trade. It removes a specific, expensive, invisible friction from trade that already happens.
Who this actually changes things for
Here is the part worth being precise about, because the benefit is not evenly distributed.
The continent's largest exporters were always going to trade regardless. A state-scale player like Morocco's OCP, the phosphate and fertilizer giant that accounts for a fifth or more of all Moroccan exports and is building supply relationships across Africa, has the treasury sophistication to manage correspondent banking and FX at scale. PAPSS helps them at the margin, but it was never what stood between them and a deal.
The businesses for whom this is genuinely transformational sit a tier down. The small and mid-sized exporters living on cash flow, for whom a multi-day payment delay and a double currency haircut is exactly what made a corridor not worth the effort. Think of the categories that already move between Morocco and Egypt and across North Africa: building materials like cement and salt, plastics and packaging, processed and milled foods, agrifood, textiles, light manufacturing. These are the firms the AfCFTA Joint Committee says it wants to help, and the firms that have historically been priced out by the payment friction rather than the paperwork.
For them, the maths changes. A corridor previously written off as not worth the hassle may now pencil out, because the cost that broke the margin has come down. That is the actionable point: if you dismissed an African export route in the past, the number that made it unviable may have just moved in your favour, and it is worth running again.
The part the headline leaves out
This is still Past the Headlines, so here is the realism.
PAPSS is infrastructure, not a magic switch. The rail exists, but using it depends on your specific bank being connected and on the staff there knowing how to process a PAPSS transaction. Adoption lags awareness, and awareness is genuinely low. Sources across 2025 and 2026 say the same thing repeatedly: many businesses, SMEs especially, simply do not know the system exists, and some connected banks have not yet trained their teams or promoted the service.
So the honest answer to "can I use this today on the Morocco to Egypt corridor" is: the infrastructure is live at both ends, and whether you can use it right now depends on whether your bank specifically has switched it on and whether you know to ask for it.
That last point is the one you can act on. The difference between the business that benefits and the one that keeps paying the correspondent-bank tax is often nothing more than walking into the bank and asking whether the payment can be routed through PAPSS. The rail is the easy part. Knowing it is there, and insisting on it, is the part still up to you.
Why this matters beyond one corridor
Morocco to Egypt is one example. The same logic applies across every corridor where both countries are on the network, and the network is growing fast, now spanning West, East, Central, North, and Southern Africa, with new products like a pan-African card scheme and a currency marketplace built on top.
This is the rare case where the optimistic headline is largely true. African financial integration here is not just a slogan. It is a working system processing real transactions. The gap between headline and reality is not that the promise is hollow. It is that the promise is real and most people do not yet know how to use it. Clunky as the export process still is, the cost that actually determined whether it was worth doing has dropped, and that is worth knowing before you decide a corridor is not for you.
The map I'm 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.
Sources: Afreximbank, PAPSS.com, African Business, TechCabal, Mobile Ecosystem Forum, WeeTracker, Arab Finance, Egypt State Information Service, OEC, OCP Group, Middle East Institute.
