Africa's cross-border payment landscape is undergoing structural change — but unevenly, and not always in the directions that headline narratives suggest. A $34 billion TAM in cross-border interbank flows across nine key corridors, combined with a growing remittance market and an increasingly active stablecoin adoption base, has attracted a new generation of alternative networks, API-based ACH providers, and digital asset platforms promising to displace the correspondent banking model. For a global payments network seeking to understand which of these emerging models are genuinely ready to serve different use cases, which corridors and payment types are most amenable to disruption, and how to position its own products and partnerships in a rapidly evolving ecosystem, a rigorous, structured analysis was essential.

The Challenge

Cross-border payments in sub-Saharan Africa are costly, slow, and fragmented — but not uniformly so, and not for the same reasons across all corridors and payment types. High-value treasury and intercompany settlement flows (averaging over $50,000 per transaction, strongly linked to letter-of-credit instructions and intercompany transfers) have very different infrastructure and risk characteristics than SME commercial payments, consumer remittances, or gig-economy disbursements. Correspondent banking has retreated from many African markets as compliance costs have risen — leaving a gap that alternative ACH networks, MTOs, BaaS-enabled card products, regional real-time platforms, and stablecoin solutions are all competing to fill. The network needed a market-by-market, use-case-by-use-case assessment of which models can realistically address which flows — and on what timeline.

The Approach

KoreFusion conducted a comprehensive cross-border payments workshop analysis spanning nine African markets — DRC, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Mozambique, South Africa, and Tanzania. The research mapped the full cross-border flow landscape across three payment categories: cross-border interbank commercial payments (TAM ~$34 billion across nine corridors, segmented by business size and payment type into a $9–19 billion SAM most amenable to new models), consumer remittances (bilateral matrix across key corridors, led by South Africa as the dominant sending hub), and B2B/SME commercial flows. Against that baseline, KoreFusion assessed four innovation cohorts at different stages of market readiness: independent end-to-end API-based ACH networks (Thunes, NIUM, and others, profiled on coverage, payout speed, and currency capabilities across target markets); BaaS and CaaS-enabled card product partnerships (short-term opportunity for MTOs to extend relevance and capture interchange); regional cross-border real-time platforms including TCIB (medium-to-long-term, highest systemic impact on remittances); and DLT messaging networks and stablecoins (long-term and niche — Yellow Card, Chipper Cash, Busha — with regulatory tailwinds strongest in South Africa and grassroots adoption measurable across Kenya, Tanzania, Ghana, and Ethiopia via Chainalysis data). A regulatory readiness assessment covered crypto licensing frameworks across all nine markets.

The Outcome

The analysis confirmed that lower-value SME-originated commercial payments — not high-value treasury flows — represent the strongest near-term opportunity for alternative cross-border models, with a serviceable addressable market of $9–19 billion once financial payments and very large-ticket intercompany settlements are excluded. The assessment identified alternative ACH networks as the most commercially ready solution cohort for the near term, with TCIB representing the highest-impact long-term infrastructure play for the region. Stablecoin and CBDC solutions were assessed as genuinely nascent — with most active providers focused on consumer remittance use cases, limited B2B commercial traction, and a regulatory environment too fragmented to support near-term scale — positioning them as complementary rather than replacement infrastructure for the foreseeable future. The workshop framework gave the network's Africa commercial and product teams a structured, evidence-based foundation for partnership prioritization and product roadmap decisions.