The Trust Gap in African Trade

Africa’s new payment networks and digital trade projects promise to make cross-border business easier. Whether banks and authorities will accept company records already verified in another country remains unclear.

Central African banks are being connected to a payment network designed to make transfers to other African markets cheaper and faster. The Bank of Central African States (BEAC)  joined the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) on 9 July, with its member countries due to follow by the end of 2026.

Payments within the region are also getting a new system. Launched on 3 August, SYSTAC 2 processes payments between 59 banks across the member countries that make up the Economic and Monetary Community of Central Africa (CEMAC). Its supplier, ProgressSoft, says instant payments will be added later, but has given no date.

For a company expanding into another African market, there’s a question running alongside these developments. Will a new bank or trading platform accept business information already verified elsewhere, or will the company have to assemble and submit the same records again?

According to the publication Belectronic, customer checks remain separate across CEMAC’s banking systems, and the bloc has no common digital identity initiative.

The View From Nigerian Businesses

An ODI Global study published in April found that 80% of its business respondents reported recurring delays in receiving payments from other African countries. The wider survey involved 108 respondents from public and private institutions, recruited through targeted outreach and stakeholder networks. While not a representative survey of Nigerian businesses, the report records a limited adoption of Legal Entity Identifiers (LEIs), standardised codes used to identify organisations in financial transactions. Nigeria had approximately 561 in September 2025, of which 541 were active, and mostly concentrated among large banks and capital-market firms, with little uptake among smaller businesses.

While these figures don’t establish that firms without LEIs suffered the payment delays, the authors of the report have identified repeated verification and manual documentation among the obstacles businesses face. The question for the new infrastructure is how much of that work it can remove.

Can Business Records Travel With The Payment?

The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Secretariat is backing projects intended to make that possible. Its Africa Digital Access and Public Infrastructure for Trade (ADAPT) initiative is designed to connect digital identity with trade information and payments. In May this year, the AfCFTA’s technical partner IOTA Foundation named Kenya, Morocco and Nigeria as the first implementation countries.

A separate agreement with Abu Dhabi-based ADI Foundation, signed on 18 July, proposes a joint venture that will explore verifiable commercial credentials. These are intended to help banks and trading partners assess a company’s transaction history across borders. The project also covers verified trade documents and connections with existing African platforms, with corridor pilots scheduled from late 2026.

The useful test would be whether a business can authorise a new institution to check an existing record, without having to collect the supporting documents again. The announcements are yet to show which institutions will accept which credentials.

On 7 August, the Secretariat signed a 20-year, $3.1 billion customs modernisation concession with Bergmans Security Consultants and Supplies. It covers digital and physical border infrastructure, including electronic exchange of customs information. Bergmans must mobilise the financing, and implementation arrangements are still to be developed with participating states.

On 31 August, a joint venture with Quest Ghana was announced for an AfCFTA Digital Trade Corridor, covering a digital marketplace and cross-border payments, alongside services for minerals and commodities. Quest values the project at $5.17 billion, and the Secretariat envisages multiple solutions coexisting with national systems.

But a shared AfCFTA connection doesn’t mean that records will be interchangeable. Could information accepted by the marketplace support an application to a bank? Could a customs authority verify a document issued through another platform? For businesses weighing up these services, the missing detail is which records each institution will accept.

The AfCFTA Digital Trade Protocol addresses this directly. Article 15(2)(c) covers cross-border authentication and electronic KYC verification of individuals and businesses. Article 19(1) requires mechanisms for mutual recognition of digital identities and other electronic credentials. The protocol also provides for electronic trade documents to have the same legal standing as paper versions.

Article 19 pairs recognition with conditions. Paragraph 1 provides for mutual recognition of electronic credentials; paragraph 2 preserves countries’ ability to require particular authentication standards or accredited certification for certain transactions. Acceptance therefore depends on the requirements agreed and applied by the receiving country. This is the kind of provision that permits a receiving authority to reject credentials another country has already accepted, whether or not a specific dispute invokes it directly.

Rwanda Tests Recognition In Practice

On 5 August, Rwanda’s Food and Drugs Authority temporarily suspended imports of 52 alcoholic beverages from six countries. Four were East African Community (EAC) partners: Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Burundi. India and Poland were also affected. Importers were ordered to recall stock and submit reports within three days. Rwanda defended the wider crackdown on public health grounds.

The Uganda National Bureau of Standards (UNBS) challenged the restrictions. It said the affected Ugandan products were certified against harmonised EAC standards and argued that Rwanda had contravened regional arrangements for recognising quality marks. UNBS also said it had received no prior formal notification.

The parallel with Article 19(2) is the continued role of national scrutiny within a recognition framework, although Rwanda’s dispute concerned product safety and the legality of its restrictions was contested. Making a certificate digitally verifiable would not, by itself, resolve that dispute.

Businesses need to know who will review a rejection and how long a decision will take. Otherwise, the time saved submitting documents can be lost waiting for an answer.

What We’re Watching

• Which banks join PAPSS, for which destinations, and at what price, as integration proceeds through 2026.
• Whether ADAPT’s initial rollout and the ADI pilots show a credential issued in one system being accepted in another.
• How Rwanda’s suspension is resolved. UNBS says an EAC Secretariat meeting on 10 August produced no technical justification for the restrictions, yet the suspension stands. That gap is the clearest live test of regional recognition under pressure.
• Whether onboarding times and repeated document requests actually fall. That is where the promised savings need to appear.