In 2024, the eight member states of the West African Economic and Monetary Union — known by its French acronym UEMOA — processed 11 billion mobile money transactions worth 160,415 billion CFA francs (roughly $267bn at prevailing rates). That figure represents 119% of the union’s combined GDP, a threshold crossed for the first time and up from 106% the year before. Put simply: more money moves through mobile wallets in this eight-country bloc than the entire formal output of its economies each year.

The raw growth is not in dispute. Transaction volumes rose 27% year-on-year, daily average transactions hit 33 million, and the value of transfers between individuals increased 44% in volume to reach 2.3 billion operations. The infrastructure underpinning all of this — SIM cards, agent networks, QR codes — has quietly become one of the most active payments systems in the world by transaction count.

What the numbers also reveal, however, is a sector whose competitive order is shifting fast, and whose relationship with its regulator has become considerably more complicated since September 30, 2025, when the Banque Centrale des Etats de l’Afrique de l’Ouest (BCEAO) officially activated its Interoperable Platform for Instant Payment Systems — the PI-SPI. The platform was designed to connect every bank account and mobile wallet across the union, allowing, in theory, a wage worker in Togo to send money instantly to a relative in Senegal regardless of which operator or bank either party uses. In practice, the two largest transaction processors in the region joined neither promptly nor fully.

Wave’s Rise: The Competitive Reordering

The most significant story inside the BCEAO’s 2024 annual report on digital financial services is not the aggregate growth — it is who is capturing it. Wave, the US-backed fintech launched in Senegal in 2018 on a flat-fee model that undercut incumbent telecom operators, has continued to take share from the sector’s traditional heavyweights.

In terms of transaction value — the more commercially meaningful metric — Wave’s share of the union-wide market rose from 34% in 2023 to 38.2% in 2024. Orange Money, the mobile financial services arm of the French telecom group, fell from 43.3% to 41.3% over the same period. MTN’s value share dropped sharply from 16.3% to 11.7%. By volume of transactions, Orange still leads at 38.4%, but that too is down from 42% in 2023, while Wave climbed from 19% to 23%.

The trajectory is clear: Wave has gained roughly four percentage points of transaction value share in a single year, while the two incumbent operators have each lost ground. At current rates of shift, Wave would surpass Orange Money by value share within two to three years, absent any structural change.

“Wave has gained roughly four percentage points of transaction value share in a single year, while the two incumbent operators have each lost ground.”

The structural driver of Wave’s growth is well understood. The company charges a flat fee — currently a fraction of what telecoms operators charge — and built its model on high volume rather than high margin per transaction. That model has proven durable partly because mobile money in West Africa has, over the past five years, become a volume game: the BCEAO data shows that the average value of a person-to-person transfer fell 9% in 2024 to 18,220 CFA francs (approximately $30), suggesting the technology is increasingly being used for routine, small-value transactions rather than large occasional remittances. That plays to Wave’s pricing architecture.

Transaction Value Share by Network (2023 vs 2024)

Source: BCEAO Annual Report on Digital Financial Services in UEMOA, 2024

The PI-SPI: What the Central Bank Built and Why

To understand why Wave’s growth trajectory is entangled with regulatory questions, it is necessary to understand what the BCEAO’s new platform does and what problem it was designed to solve.

The PI-SPI — Plateforme Interopérable du Système de Paiement Instantané — is a central clearing infrastructure that allows transactions to move instantly between any participating institution, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, regardless of whether the sender is using a bank account or a mobile wallet. Before PI-SPI, a customer of Wave could not easily send money directly to a customer of a bank, or vice versa, without going through an intermediary step — usually a cash withdrawal and redeposit. The PI-SPI eliminates that friction by operating as a shared rail beneath all participating institutions.

The platform launched in September 2025 after a pilot phase earlier in the year. By February 2026 — five months after launch — the list of participants had grown from an initial 31 institutions to more than 70, including established commercial banks such as BOA, Coris Bank, UBA, and Ecobank across multiple member states. Microfinance institutions such as Baobab and Cofina joined relatively quickly, drawn by the prospect of connecting their rural client base to the broader financial system.

What the platform also does, by design, is mandate free person-to-person transfers between participating institutions. The logic is straightforward: if the central bank is providing the rail, the commercial case for operators charging a routing fee between networks disappears. For operators whose revenue models depend partly on transfer fees, this represents a structural compression of one income stream.

The Absentees: Why Wave and Orange Moved Slowly

When PI-SPI launched, Wave and Orange Money were not among the initial cohort of 31 providers. Six months later, their integration status remained, at best, partial and contested.

For Wave, the calculus is commercially transparent. The company built its competitive advantage on a closed-loop network: customers transact with other Wave customers, and the simplicity and low cost of that experience is the product. Full interoperability through PI-SPI introduces a dual-edged dynamic. On one side is the opportunity: access to the funds held in traditional bank accounts, which has historically been a friction point for mobile money users seeking to bridge the formal and informal economy. On the other side is the threat: if every bank app and microfinance platform can now replicate Wave’s core proposition — fast, cheap transfers — the operational moat narrows considerably.

Wave is, in other words, being asked to join a platform that was partly designed to make it easier for incumbents to do what Wave built its business doing. Whether that reads as regulatory levelling or competitive neutralisation depends on one’s perspective.

“Wave is being asked to join a platform that was partly designed to make it easier for incumbents to do what Wave built its business doing.”

Orange Money’s position is more publicly complicated. The company has stated it is in compliance with the BCEAO’s rules, but the manner of that compliance has attracted political scrutiny. The central bank’s mandate requires that transfers between participating accounts on PI-SPI be free. Orange Money’s response, according to Senegalese MP Saliou Ndione, who raised the issue publicly in early 2026, was to eliminate transfer fees while simultaneously introducing a 1% withdrawal fee — capped at 5,000 CFA francs — on cash-outs.

The allegation, as Ndione framed it, is that Orange Money effectively shifted the commercial burden of the free-transfer mandate from the moment of sending to the moment of withdrawal. In a market where the BCEAO’s own data shows 88% of all deposits into mobile wallets are subsequently withdrawn as cash — meaning the overwhelming majority of mobile money users still treat the wallet as a transit point rather than a store of value — a 1% withdrawal fee is not a marginal charge. It is a tax on the dominant use case.

The Cash Problem: Digital Volumes, Analogue Behaviour

The Orange Money controversy sits within a broader structural challenge that the BCEAO’s 2024 data makes visible in some detail. Mobile money adoption in UEMOA is, by most measures, genuinely widespread: 248 million accounts have been opened across the eight member states — a figure that has multiplied nearly tenfold since 2015. But account opening and account use are different things.

Only 76.8 million of those 248 million accounts — roughly 31% — recorded at least one transaction in the previous 90 days. The account activation rate has been falling for five consecutive years, from 45% in 2020 to 31% in 2024. The number of open accounts grew 2.6 times over five years; the number of active accounts grew only 1.8 times. The gap is widening, not closing.

More revealing still is the net digitalisation ratio — a metric the BCEAO uses to measure how much money deposited into mobile wallets actually stays there and is used digitally, rather than being withdrawn as cash. In 2024, that ratio stood at 7.52%. That means for every 100 CFA francs deposited into a mobile wallet across the union, 92.48 francs were eventually withdrawn in cash. The figure improved slightly from 6.39% in 2023, but it remains dramatically below the 19% recorded in 2020.

This dynamic shapes the Orange Money fee controversy directly. If the predominant use case for mobile money remains cash-in, transfer, cash-out — rather than end-to-end digital payment — then a withdrawal fee does not nudge users toward digital behaviour so much as it penalises the transaction pattern that defines how most people in the region actually use the product. Whether that pressure changes behaviour or simply increases the cost of financial access is an empirical question the current data does not yet answer.

Where The Growth Is Actually Happening

Not all the data points to stagnation. Two developments stand out as genuinely structural shifts rather than incremental improvements.

The first is merchant acceptance. The number of merchants registered to accept mobile payments more than doubled in 2024, from 1.75 million to 3.7 million, driven by aggressive deployment of QR-code-based payment solutions — particularly in Côte d’Ivoire, where registered merchant points grew from 1.13 million to 2.72 million in a single year. The share of mobile payments accounted for by merchant transactions has risen from 3.3% of all payment volume in 2020 to 23.3% in 2024. If that trajectory holds, the architecture of mobile money usage is genuinely shifting away from peer-to-peer transfers and toward everyday commerce.

The second is the increasing activity of commercial banks within the mobile money layer. Banks’ share of total transaction volume in UEMOA rose from 13% in 2023 to 18% in 2024, driven by an expansion of fintech partnerships — from 44 to 52 in one year. Banks are not ceding the mobile money space to telecoms operators and fintechs; they are learning to compete within it. The PI-SPI, by providing neutral infrastructure that banks can use to reach mobile wallet users, accelerates that dynamic.

The geographic concentration of activity is also worth noting. Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal together accounted for approximately 65% of total transaction value in 2024. Côte d’Ivoire alone holds 40% of all open accounts in the union, with 99 million registered. The digital financial system is, at the level of economic weight, a two-country story even as it is technically an eight-country regulatory project.

PI-SPI Participant Positioning (As of February 2026)

Sources: BCEAO 2024 Report; industry reporting, February 2026

As Wave continues to operate in a market where its growth trajectory is outpacing its competitors, its pricing model remains structurally disruptive, and the regulatory environment is evolving in ways that could either constrain or accelerate its reach. A company that joins PI-SPI gains access to bank deposits; one that does not retains its closed-loop simplicity. Which path Wave chooses — and when — may prove to be the more consequential decision in West African payments than anything the central bank announces this year.

Data sourced from BCEAO Annual Report on the Evolution of Digital Financial Services in UEMOA, 2024 (published January 2026), and industry reporting dated February–March 2026. All CFA franc figures converted at $0.00167 per FCFA. Wave and Orange Money did not respond to requests for comment.