East Africa’s push to knit its national payment systems into a single regional market is, at its core, an infrastructure investment story: the region is choosing to connect what already exists rather than spend on building something new. The choice carries clear economic logic. By linking Tanzania’s Instant Payment System (TIPS) with Rwanda’s National Payment Switch (RSwitch), the two countries are attempting to create an instant-payment corridor under the Cross-Border Payment System Masterplan of the East African Community (EAC), turning existing national assets into regional commercial infrastructure with far lower capital outlay than a greenfield platform would require.
The commercial stakes are substantial. Total trade for EAC members in 2025 is reported at $156.6 billion, including $19.3 billion among partner states. Those figures underscore why the region’s treasuries and policymakers treat payment interoperability as an economic priority rather than a technical curiosity. As goods and services move more freely across the region, the financial plumbing beneath those transactions must become easier and cheaper to use, or the trade gains will be blunted by settlement friction.
The Rwanda-Tanzania corridor is the most immediate test of the concept, and the work has moved beyond policy discussion into the technical, operational, and regulatory arrangements required to make the system function. Its significance extends well beyond faster remittances. If national payment systems become interoperable, businesses could pay suppliers, receive payments from customers, and settle commercial transactions across borders more easily than under traditional arrangements. Small and midsize enterprises, banks, fintech companies, and mobile-money operators all stand to benefit if regional payments begin to match the speed and convenience of domestic transactions. For those operators, the corridor represents both an opportunity to expand cross-border revenue and a test of whether the economics of regional settlement can be made to work.
Kenya offers a second, differently structured route to the same objective. Pesalink, the country’s instant-payment network, connected to the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) in February. The partnership enables instant, round-the-clock payments from PAPSS participants to banks and mobile-money operators on the Pesalink network, with transactions settled in local currencies. Where Rwanda and Tanzania are connecting their national instant payment systems directly, Kenya is linking its domestic infrastructure to a wider continental network. Taken together, the two developments suggest that African payments integration may depend less on building a single system than on making existing systems work together, an approach that spreads capital commitments across existing operators instead of concentrating them in one new platform.
Meanwhile, a broader regional effort is moving into implementation. On August 24, the EAC announced the establishment of three technical working groups to support implementation of its Masterplan. The Masterplan is anchored on four key pillars: governance and regulation, infrastructure, inclusivity, and capacity building. It includes 20 strategic initiatives to strengthen cross-border payment systems, a program that effectively sets the investment and regulatory agenda for the region’s financial institutions and payment operators.
Market participants see significant upside in the direction of travel. “East Africa’s push for interoperable payments could fundamentally change the economics of regional trade,” said Robert Omotunde, executive director and chief investment officer of Lagos-based asset management and advisory firm MDU Capital. “The significance goes beyond making cross-border transactions faster or cheaper; it is about creating the financial infrastructure through which African businesses can trade more seamlessly across borders.”
For investors and operators, the risk-return calculation is shaped by the African Continental Free Trade Area, which is expanding markets for cross-border businesses and increasing demand for payment systems that support that commerce. Opportunities could eventually extend beyond the EAC. Faster settlement, lower transaction costs, and greater use of local currencies could reduce some of the financial friction that still accompanies regional trade, improving margins for the banks, fintechs, and mobile-money operators that move the region’s money.
The central challenge, however, is operational reliability. East Africa is connecting payment systems already embedded in its banks, mobile-money networks, and the wider financial system, and the region must now ensure those connections operate reliably across different regulatory and monetary environments. How well that is managed will determine whether the region’s payment integration delivers returns for the businesses and institutions that depend on it.