By the numbers, 2025 was the year the Banque Centrale des États de l’Afrique de l’Ouest (BCEAO) finally delivered the instant-payment rail it had been promising the eight-country West African Economic and Monetary Union (UEMOA/WAEMU) for years. By the small print, it was also the year the region’s central bank discovered, again, that building a payment platform is the easy part; getting 100 million people and thousands of institutions to actually use it is the multi-year slog.
On September 30, the BCEAO switched on the Plateforme Interopérable du Système de Paiement Instantané, mercifully abbreviated to PI-SPI, at a launch ceremony at its Dakar headquarters attended by the requisite photo-line of dignitaries. The pitch is straightforward enough: let anyone in Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Senegal or Togo move money between a bank account, a mobile-money wallet or a microfinance account, instantly, around the clock, using nothing more than a phone number instead of the traditional — and famously indecipherable — bank identifier statement (RIB). It runs on the ISO 20022 messaging standard, the closest thing the plumbing of global finance has to a lingua franca, and transactions are irrevocable once validated, a design choice that will be either a triumph of certainty or a headache for the first person who fat-fingers a transfer to the wrong cousin.
The BCEAO frames PI-SPI as the answer to a familiar litany of regional payment complaints: fragmented services in which every provider operates in its own silo, fees that are opaque where they are not simply high, patchy merchant acceptance of digital payments, and fraud risk baked into a system still leaning on manual, paper-based rails. Whether one platform, however well engineered, dissolves fragmentation built up over a decade of competing mobile-money and bank rails is the sort of question central banks tend to answer with press releases rather than data — for now.
The onboarding numbers, so far
As of December 31, 2025 — three months after launch — the BCEAO says 74 institutions had connected to PI-SPI and opened its services to the public: 58 banks, seven electronic-money establishments and nine microfinance institutions. That is a respectable running start for a brand-new regional rail, though it is worth noting what the figure does not tell us: how many of those 74 are live with meaningful transaction volumes rather than technically “connected,” and how many of the roughly 150-plus banks and dozens of e-money issuers licensed across the union have yet to bother. The report does not publish a PI-SPI transaction count for 2025 — understandable for a system three months old, but it also means the platform’s actual traction, as opposed to its guest list, remains a 2026 story.
The plumbing that already works
While PI-SPI grabs the launch-day headlines, the older regional payment infrastructure did the heavy lifting in 2025, and the numbers are the report’s most concrete evidence of a genuinely more digitised region.
STAR-UEMOA, the automated transfer and settlement system that handles large-value and interbank transactions, processed 1.87 million operations worth CFA1,248 trillion ( $2.17 billion USD) in 2025, up 9.4% in volume and 2.6% in value on 2024. Its 153 participants edged up from 152.
SICA-UEMOA, the automated interbank clearing system that handles the bulk of everyday retail transfers and cheques, processed a rather more eye-catching 31.2 million operations worth CFA88.5 trillion ($153.7 billion USD) — up 3.8% in volume and 9.3% in value, with 154 participants. In plain terms: STAR-UEMOA moves the big money in comparatively few transactions; SICA-UEMOA moves everyone’s money, all the time, in bulk. Between the two, SICA-UEMOA is unambiguously “the one that processed the most” by volume, if considerably less by value per transaction.
Cross-border transfers within the union — money moving between, say, Abidjan and Dakar rather than staying within one country — rose 5.3% in value to CFA115 trillion ($199.67 billion USD) on STAR-UEMOA, now 9.2% of that system’s total value. It is a modest but real sign of the “single market” ambition behind UEMOA’s common currency actually showing up in payment flows, rather than remaining a line in a treaty.
And here is where the report earns its wry footnote: for all the talk of digitisation, cheques still accounted for 71.7% of the value of clearing-system transactions in 2025, even as their share of transaction volume slipped to 24.6%. Transfers, meanwhile, made up 74.1% of volume and are growing faster in value terms (+21.5%). The direction of travel is clear — West African payments are shifting from paper to electronic rails — but anyone picturing the region as a cashless, chequebook-free frontier should note that when it comes to the money that actually matters, the humble cheque is not going quietly.
The fintech paperwork
Behind the platform launches, the BCEAO’s licensing machinery ground through a busy year. It processed 79 applications for “payment institution” status, approving 30 — a roughly 38% approval rate that says less about fintech quality in the region and more about how seriously the regulator is now taking the category. Separately, 12 new electronic-money issuance approvals brought the total number of licensed e-money issuers across the union to 81, with Senegal (11) and Côte d’Ivoire (9) hosting the largest concentrations, reflecting each country’s head start in mobile-money adoption. (The report’s own country-by-country breakdown does not cleanly reconcile with its headline totals — a minor but recurring irritant in central-bank annual reports the world over, where the tables are evidently drafted by a different committee than the prose.) Last year, these fintechs were at the centre of a sustained regulatory crackdown as the central bank sought to bring the sector under its oversight.
The BCEAO also opened its regulatory sandbox, the Laboratoire d’Innovation Financière (LIF-BCEAO), on April 8, allowing licensed fintechs to trial products under supervision before going to market — a belated but sensible concession to an industry that has spent years innovating faster than the rulebook could keep up. A new committee on virtual assets, convened in October, has been tasked with drafting the region’s crypto-asset rules, building on a 2024 instruction on payment services; a “feuille de route” (roadmap) has reportedly been adopted, which is central-bank-speak for “watch this space, slowly.”
The longer game
Further down the priority list — but not off it — sits the BCEAO’s central bank digital currency project, which completed the “modalities” of a proof-of-concept phase in 2025, following an initial phase that wrapped up at the end of 2024. Progress on CBDCs the world over tends to move at roughly the pace of continental drift, and UEMOA’s effort is no exception; nothing here suggests a retail digital CFA franc is imminent.
More consequentially, the BCEAO used 2025 to lay groundwork for connecting its systems to the wider African payments landscape: talks with the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), the AfCFTA-backed initiative aiming to cover half of intra-African trade payments by 2045 — a target comfortably distant enough that nobody currently holding office will be asked to account for it — and continued engagement with ECOWAS’s own payments and settlement system (EPSS), which aims to link West African payment rails regardless of currency union.
Taken together, the 2025 report describes a central bank moving with real intent — a live instant-payment platform, a functioning sandbox, rising digital transaction volumes, a fatter e-money licensing pipeline — while also, inadvertently, cataloguing how much institutional machinery (committees, instructions, roadmaps, proofs-of-concept) still stands between announcement and adoption. PI-SPI’s 74 onboarded institutions are a real start. Whether West African consumers actually use it to leapfrog the cheque, or simply add one more app to a mobile-money landscape already crowded with options, is the question 2026’s report will have to answer.
Source: BCEAO Rapport Annuel 2025.