The African Continental Free Trade Area Secretariat, the Bank of Ghana, the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, and ODI Global have marked the soft launch of Neofingo, a digital trade finance corridor designed to simplify and accelerate access to cross-border trade finance for African small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
The initiative introduces what stakeholders describe as a “jointly governed protocol” linking UK digital finance actors with African fintech ecosystems through an AI-enabled and validated digital letter of credit, in a move intended to modernise trade documentation and reduce frictions that continue to constrain intra-African and international commerce.
The launch highlights persistent inefficiencies in traditional paper-based trade finance systems, which continue to constrain African businesses, particularly SMEs. Conventional letter-of-credit processes have long been associated with documentation delays, manual errors, high processing costs, and limited accessibility for smaller firms seeking to participate in regional and global trade.
The proposed Neofingo framework is designed to help digitise trade documentation and compliance processes, support programmable digital letters of credit for SMEs, and create more interoperable financial messaging and audit systems across jurisdictions. The initiative is also intended to align with evolving legal and digital trade frameworks in both the UK and Africa, including infrastructure linked to the AfCFTA and Ghana’s fintech regulatory environment.
Stakeholders behind the initiative position it as a practical intervention to address long-standing structural barriers in trade finance, especially for smaller exporters that often struggle to meet the requirements of traditional banking channels. ODI notes that Africa continues to face a substantial trade finance shortfall, with an estimated $120 billion in viable trade going unfunded each year, underscoring the scale of the access challenge confronting businesses across the continent.
The development also reflects Ghana’s policy push toward digitalisation in cross-border trade and payments. In 2024, the Bank of Ghana announced the successful completion of a proof of concept involving the use of digital credentials for international trade and cross-border payments, highlighting the increasing institutional support for technology-enabled trade systems and financial infrastructure reform.
Neofingo is expected to contribute to ongoing efforts to make AfCFTA implementation more commercially meaningful for businesses by reducing transaction friction, improving trust and verification in trade processes, and expanding access to formal financing tools that have historically been difficult for SMEs to obtain.
The soft launch, therefore, positions Neofingo not merely as a fintech innovation but as an institutional and regulatory experiment in building more accessible trade infrastructure. If scaled effectively, it could support efforts to narrow sub-Saharan Africa’s trade finance gap while advancing a more inclusive and digitally enabled model of cross-border commerce under the AfCFTA framework.
