In less than two decades, a continent where the majority of adults had no formal banking relationship built one of the world’s most sophisticated mobile payment systems almost from scratch.
Africa now leads the planet in mobile money accounts per capita, in transaction volumes, and in the sheer pace of financial services innovation. The numbers that define this achievement are staggering: over 500 million active mobile money accounts processing more than $830 billion in transactions annually. Africa’s digital payments market is projected to exceed $40 billion in revenues in 2026.
A new BCG report estimates the continent’s fintech revenues will grow nearly 13-fold to reach $65 billion by 2030.
The first wave of that growth was built on a single powerful insight: that a mobile phone number could serve as a bank account. That insight, turned into M-Pesa in Kenya and then replicated by MTN MoMo, Airtel Money, and dozens of others across the continent, connected hundreds of millions of people to basic financial services faster than any formal banking expansion ever had.
Ghana itself became a mobile money powerhouse, with digital transactions now deeply embedded into everyday economic life from Accra’s markets to the northern farming communities that had never seen a bank branch.
Why the second wave is different and harder
But access to payments, it turns out, is not the same as access to financial depth. While 40 percent of adults in sub-Saharan Africa now use mobile money, more than half of all lending on the continent still flows through informal or semi-formal channels.
Small businesses can receive payments digitally, but still cannot get a working capital loan at a reasonable rate. Farmers can send money to their families, but cannot insure their harvests. Young professionals can split a restaurant bill on their phone, but cannot save into a structured product that builds long-term wealth. The BCG report frames this as the defining challenge of the second fintech wave, moving from platforms that move money to systems that build financial lives.
At the 3i Africa Summit in Accra last week, industry leaders argued that the answer lies in interoperability: making the rails that already exist work together across borders and institutions, rather than building competing silos. Africa’s fintech story is not finished. It is just entering its most consequential chapter.
