For many customers, it starts with something remarkably simple. A few clicks on their phone, a transfer instruction entered in naira, a beneficiary in another African country receives the funds in their local currency moments later. The transaction is completed within minutes and a receipt generated.
What makes it extraordinary is everything that does not happen: there is no scramble for dollars, no form asking for correspondent bank details, no three-day wait while money sits in transit somewhere between New York and Lagos. The money simply never leaves Africa to get to Africa.
That efficiency is the promise of the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS). PAPSS was built for one reason: to let Africa settle its own trade in its own currencies. It now connects 28 African countries including Nigeria, Ghana and Sierra Leone to Kenya, Rwanda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
Until recently, Nigerian banks could not use it to its full potential. That changed in March last year when the Central Bank of Nigeria introduced the SSA-3 settlement model. Under this model, banks like FirstBank are allowed to fund their own settlement accounts with Afreximbank. PAPSS then does what it was designed to do: it takes the local currency instruction, delivers the local currency value on the other side, and settles the difference between banks once a day.
FirstBank has taken that regulatory opening and turned it into a retail reality. The bank has integrated PAPSS directly into LIT App, FirstMobile and FirstOnline. If you have any of these channels, you already have access. You simply log in, select PAPSS as your transfer option, enter the beneficiary’s full name, bank, account number and country, and you initiate the transaction in naira. The beneficiary gets it in their local African currency in two minutes or less.
The bank has kept the limits practical for everyday use. On its digital channels, individuals can transact up to the naira equivalent of $2,000 per month and corporates up to $5,000, all within the basic documentation allowed by the CBN framework. With transparent fees that are significantly lower than the average cost of traditional correspondent banking wires, and payments completed within two minutes, any day, any hour, PAPSS offers a seamless cross-border payment experience.
Today, the platform connects an expanding network of countries across the continent, allowing businesses and individuals to transact more efficiently than ever before. It is the importer in Onitsha paying a supplier in Nairobi. It is the parent in Abuja paying school fees for their daughter in Kigali. It is the business in Ibadan receiving payment from a customer in Zimbabwe without having to invoice in dollars. It is the family sending support across borders without losing a third of the value to charges.
Those everyday transactions point to a larger shift. Intra-African trade has for years been held back not by lack of demand but by lack of payment enablers. In the end, the most powerful infrastructure is the one the user does not have to think about. Just money, moving from one African account to another, in local currency, in real time, enabled by FirstBank.
PAPSS will not remove all frictions overnight. Regulatory requirements continue to apply, transaction thresholds still exist, and widespread adoption will take time. But the foundation has moved from blueprint to a live system, and FirstBank has put that system in the palm of its customers.
Yet the direction is unmistakable.
The infrastructure is operational, participation is expanding, and FirstBank is bringing the benefits closer to customers. What was once a vision of seamless intra-African payments has become an everyday reality.
In the years ahead, PAPSS may prove to be one of the most consequential pieces of financial infrastructure supporting Africa’s economic integration. And as FirstBank continues to connect customers to that ecosystem, the continent moves closer to a future where sending money across Africa is no more complicated than making a transfer across town.
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