Building a robust pan-African payments business is not for the faint hearted. For over a decade Peach Payments has identified, absorbed and solved the complexity for merchants as they scale. Terminology such as “easy”, “simple” and “one-click”, now synonymous with payments providers, just scratch the surface of a payments infrastructure decades in the making. Let’s pull back the curtain of how we got here.

The Gap Between Narrative and Infrastructure

For more than a decade, the global financial community has been captivated by the “Africa Rising” narrative. It is a story told in broad, optimistic strokes: a continent of 1.4 billion people, the youngest median age on the planet, and a digital-first population that famously leapfrogged the desktop era straight into the mobile age.

From a high-level perspective, the trajectory looks like a straight line toward prosperity.

However, as any enterprise leader operating within the African landscape will tell you, the view from the boardroom is often much more granular and far more complex. There is a profound gap between the optimistic narrative of a unified digital market and the technical, fragmented reality of moving money across borders. In Africa, payments are not just another feature of commerce; they are the primary friction point.

Moving value from Point A to Point B within a country and more so across the continent is fundamentally hard. It is not merely a challenge of writing efficient code or building sleek user interfaces. It is a grueling exercise in navigating varied capital controls, managing the volatility of dozens of different currencies, and coordinating with a patchwork of disparate banking partners, each with their own legacy systems and regulatory hurdles.

At Peach Payments, our thesis is simple: Success for the modern enterprise does not come from a “simple plug-and-play” solution. In a market this fragmented, simplicity is often a mask for fragility. True scale requires a robust architecture, a system designed not only to process transactions, but also to withstand the structural chaos of a continent in flux.

The Fragmentation of Value: Processing $6 Billion in a Regional Mosaic

To understand the scale of the challenge is to understand the sheer volume of value currently being orchestrated behind the scenes. Peach Payments annually processes over  USD $6 Billion. This isn’t just a vanity metric; it represents the lifeblood of thousands of enterprises, from global airlines and insurance giants to domestic retail powerhouses.

Our infrastructure is currently live with over 50 stores of value, such as card acquirers, mobile money wallets, buy now pay later services and more,  across the continent. This is  a technical feat that has allowed us to transition from a South African stalwart to a truly pan-African leader. Our footprint now covers the strategic hubs of South Africa, Kenya, and Mauritius, and has recently expanded into the high-growth markets of West Africa.

The acquisition of the West-African payment platform PayDunya was a pivotal moment in this journey. It wasn’t just about adding dots to a map; it was about gaining entry into the UEMOA Francophone zone,  specifically Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, Burkina Faso, Togo, and Mali.

This region represents a massive, underserved economic block that operates under a different regulatory and cultural logic than the Anglophone markets of the south and east.

When you look at this regional mosaic, the fragmentation becomes visible. In South Africa, the payment landscape is relatively mature, with card transactions (credit and debit) still dominating approximately 70% of the online market.

However, as you move north, the picture shifts dramatically. In Kenya and across West Africa, “the card” is often the alternative, not the norm. Here, value is stored and moved through a dizzying array of Alternative Payment Methods (APMs)—digital wallets, vouchers, and mobile money systems like M-Pesa or Orange Money.

Enterprises attempting to scale across these borders cannot simply export their South African payment strategy. They need a partner who understands that in Nairobi, “cash is king” has been replaced by “mobile money is king maker”.

First published in the Business Day Payments, May 2026. Read part 2 here.