Africa's payments ecosystem has made genuine progress. Mobile money adoption is among the highest in the world. Digital wallets have reached populations that traditional banking never did. A new generation of fintechs is building products that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. But beneath the growth, structural gaps remain — and they are costing African businesses in ways that compound quietly. Fragmented infrastructure, regulatory divergence, and incomplete interoperability are not just technical inconveniences. They are real constraints on trade, growth, and Africa's ability to compete on a global stage. Here are the four gaps that matter most — and what closing them would actually look like. 1. Payment Switches: Fragmentation Where There Should Be Flow A payment switch is the infrastructure that connects banks, payment service providers, and fintechs so that money can move between them reliably and efficiently. Where these work well — as with India's UPI or Europe's SEPA — a single integration gives access to an entire market. In Africa, each country has largely built its own system in isolation. Nigeria has NIBSS, Kenya has PesaLink, Ghana has GhIPSS, and South Africa has BankservAfrica. Each works effectively within its own borders. Across borders, the picture changes entirely. The result is fragmented corridors, duplicated integration costs, and cross-border flows that are slower and more expensive than they need to be. A payment that would take seconds domestically can take days internationally — not because the technology does not exist to do better, but because the systems were never designed to connect. Global precedent points clearly to what works. India's UPI scaled to billions of transactions through a single interoperable framework open to all participants. SEPA created a unified euro payments zone across 27 countries. Africa does not need to copy these models exactly, but the principle — shared standards, connected infrastructure — applies just as directly. Until African payment switches are linked or harmonised across borders, the continent will keep operating in siloed corridors when it should be operating as a network. 2. Mobile Money Interoperability: The Walled Garden Problem Mobile money is Africa's most significant payments success story. M-Pesa in Kenya, MTN MoMo in Ghana, and across West Africa, Airtel Money across East and Central Africa — mobile wallets have reached and served populations that formal banking has not. In many markets, the mobile wallet is the primary financial account. But mobile money's greatest structural weakness is also one of its most persistent features: each network largely operates as a closed system. Moving funds across networks — from MTN to Airtel, from a Ghanaian wallet to a Zambian one — involves friction, fees, and delays that undermine the convenience that makes mobile money valuable in the first place. For individual consumers, this is an inconvenience. For businesses