Morocco’s decade-long effort to unbundle its card payments infrastructure reached its conclusion this month, after the central bank and competition watchdog confirmed that the bank-owned processor CMI has been fully stripped of its merchant-acquiring business and repositioned as a neutral utility. The move, paired with a steep cut in interchange fees, ends a system in which the country’s largest commercial banks controlled every link in the domestic card payment chain and hands the acquiring market to newly licensed payment institutions, many of them fintechs.
For most of the past two decades, the Centre Monétique Interbancaire (CMI) was the sole entity that signed up merchants to accept card payments, while also running the central processing switch through which all domestic card transactions flowed. Owned by a consortium of Morocco’s biggest banks, CMI processed more than 200 million transactions annually by 2024. Its vertically integrated model gave it no incentive to court smaller retailers or to drive down the merchant fees that ultimately determine whether a corner shop can afford to take cards.
That architecture began to crack in 2023–24, when the Conseil de la Concurrence, Morocco’s antitrust authority, investigated the market for card payments and extracted a package of legally binding commitments from CMI and its shareholder banks. Under Decision №152/D/2024 of 31 October 2024, CMI was ordered to stop signing new merchants from 1 November 2024 and to divest its entire portfolio of acquiring contracts. Private-sector agreements were to be transferred by 31 January 2026 and public-sector ones by 30 April 2026.
The timeline nearly faltered. In October 2025, weeks before the original deadline, the Competition Council granted a three- to six-month extension after CMI argued that obtaining the necessary regulatory approvals was taking too long and that any disruption to card acceptance during the Africa Cup of Nations football tournament, which Morocco was hosting, could damage confidence. The delay annoyed the fintechs that had already invested in building acquiring businesses on CMI’s platform, including Al Filahi Cash, Damane Cash, and Attijari Payment, leaving them reliant on the incumbent’s infrastructure while waiting to compete for its customers on equal terms.
A joint communiqué issued on 10 July 2026 by Bank Al-Maghrib and the Competition Council now declares that wait over. “The two authorities have welcomed the satisfactory results of this cooperation,” it stated, noting that the transfer of CMI’s merchant portfolio had been completed on schedule and that the market had “transitioned from a mono-acquirer model towards a multi-acquirer architecture” without interruption to service. Neither institution disclosed the identities of the acquirers that took over the contracts, but the fintechs that had been positioning themselves since 2025 are the most obvious candidates.
The structural separation was reinforced by a separate decision from the central bank that slashes the cost of card acceptance for the smallest merchants. Bank Al-Maghrib first capped domestic interchange fees — the levy paid by a merchant’s acquirer to the cardholder’s issuing bank on each transaction — at 0.65 per cent in October 2024. A further decision, №265/W/2026 of 6 July 2026, lowers that cap to 0.50 per cent from 1 October 2026 and, for the first time, introduces a special ceiling of 0.15 per cent for payments to government entities and for “proximity commerce,” a category that includes the small neighbourhood shops, known locally as hanouts, which account for a large share of Morocco’s daily retail trade. At 0.15 per cent, the interchange cost on a 10-dirham purchase is just 1.5 centimes, making card acceptance economically viable for transactions that were previously processed in cash by default. This presents a considerable opportunity for fintechs targeting hanouts such WafR, Woliz, Chari, z.systems, among others.
The reform creates a fundamentally different operating environment for fintechs. Without a legacy acquiring arm and under a regulatory obligation to provide fair, transparent and non-discriminatory access to its switching platform, CMI now functions as a common carrier. New entrants can compete on the price of acquiring services, on the speed with which they settle funds to merchants, and on the software-based tools they bundle with payment acceptance — such as soft‑POS applications that turn a merchant’s smartphone into a contactless terminal, instant settlement, and digital ledgers that can serve as a basis for credit offers. Because fintechs typically operate with lighter cost bases and digital-first merchant onboarding, they are better placed than traditional banks to target the long tail of micro-merchants that the 0.15 per cent interchange cap was designed to benefit.
Small shopkeepers stand to gain directly. Before the reforms, a merchant wanting to accept cards faced a single provider, opaque pricing and fees that made it difficult to justify acceptance for low-value items. The combination of forced competition among acquirers and a drastically reduced interchange floor means the all-in merchant discount rate — the total fee a shop pays per transaction — should fall. New entrants have an incentive to design offers tailored to small retailers: no monthly terminal rental, no minimum transaction volumes, and smartphone-based acceptance that removes the need for dedicated hardware.
Bank Al-Maghrib has been supervising the new payment institutions as they expand their acquiring activities, ensuring they meet the security, business continuity and reliability standards applicable to payment services. The joint statement indicated that the central bank and the Competition Council will continue to monitor the market together and “facilitate citizens’ and merchants’ access to secure electronic solutions at competitive costs.”
The Moroccan approach — forced functional separation of the national switch from acquiring, a rigid timetable for the transfer of the incumbent’s merchant book, and simultaneous fee compression — is being watched closely in other emerging markets where a single bank-owned processor dominates. The outcome, as described by the regulators, is that a market long controlled by a banking cartel has been turned into a competitive arena in which fintechs can finally contest for merchants on their own terms. The test now is whether the new acquirers can rapidly extend card acceptance beyond the large retailers that CMI had historically served and into the cash-dependent small-business economy that the fee caps were designed to reach.