Across six countries sharing a central bank and a currency, a largely unknown interoperability platform is accumulating evidence that card-based payments can work in Central Africa — provided the infrastructure is in place.

GIMACPAY, operated by the Groupement Interbancaire Monétique de l’Afrique Centrale, processed 16,972 transactions in 2024 with a combined value of 726.97 billion CFA francs ($1.3085 billion), according to the Banque des États de l’Afrique Centrale’s annual report published this year. That represents a volume increase of 33.5 per cent on the previous year, when 12,716 transactions totalling 640.61 billion FCFA ($1.153 billion) cleared through the system.

Comparison to Regional Payment Volumes

The comparison to broader regional payment volumes gives the figure its weight. SYSTAC, the BEAC-operated retail clearing system through which cheques, bank transfers and GIMACPAY settlements are processed, handled nearly 18 million operations worth 21.68 trillion FCFA ($39.024 billion) across the same period — growth of 6.7 per cent by volume and 12.3 per cent by value. GIMACPAY’s volume growth is running at five times the pace of the overall retail payment system.

That differential is what makes GIMACPAY worth examining. It is far from the largest payment network in the Communauté Économique et Monétaire de l’Afrique Centrale (CEMAC). But in a region where the conventional assumption has long been that card infrastructure cannot scale, the direction of travel is not trivial.

The Problem GIMACPAY was Built to Solve

The CEMAC zone spans Cameroon, Congo, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Chad and the Central African Republic — a combined population of roughly 68 million people and an economy of some 73 trillion FCFA ($131.4 billion) in nominal output. The six countries share a currency, but until GIMACPAY’s parent organisation established a common monetic processing centre, a bank card issued in Douala could not reliably be accepted in Libreville.

GIMACPAY addresses that by providing a regional hub for card payment authorisation, clearing and settlement. Its settlements feed into SYGMA, the large-value payment system that processed 453,634 transactions worth 547.99 trillion FCFA ($986.38 billion) in 2024 — a 96.2 per cent jump in value year on year.

The case is structurally straightforward:

• Interoperability: A single connection provides access to every participating institution in the zone.
• Centralization: It functions similarly to global card networks but operates under central bank oversight.

The Persistent Challenge of Cash

GIMACPAY’s growth trajectory sits against a backdrop that complicates any straightforward reading. The BEAC’s 2024 report records that physical currency in circulation across the CEMAC zone increased 13 per cent to reach 5.36 trillion FCFA ($9.648 billion). Cash as a share of the broad money supply edged up from 22 to 22.4 per cent.

The central bank is direct about what this indicates: the persistent preference for cash remains the defining characteristic of payment behaviour in the zone, despite the expansion of electronic channels. While a 33.5 per cent increase in card volume is material, 16,972 transactions across 68 million people represents penetration measured in fractions of a percentage point.

Continental Context and Cross-Border Flows

The BEAC’s annual report records that CEMAC financial institutions transmitted 760,379 cross-border orders worth 33.11 trillion FCFA ($59.598 billion) to their international correspondents in 2024 — a 163 per cent increase in value over 2023, driven in part by sovereign eurobond proceeds and extractive sector flows.

These are the corridors in which GIMACPAY’s regional model — centralised interoperability under a supranational central bank — is increasingly discussed as a template for other sub-regional currency unions.

What the BEAC data establishes is that GIMACPAY is growing at a rate that materially outpaces the broader payment system, and that the growth appears to be domestically driven. Whether this produces the scale shift envisaged by the regional financial inclusion strategy depends on infrastructure commitments like merchant terminals and consumer card issuance that remain largely unfinished.