InstaPay to connect with pan-African payment system as six Egyptian banks apply for integration

The ​​African Export-Import Bank (AfreximBank) is planning to connect its Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) to Egypt’s InstaPay app, and six local banks have already applied to the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) for final integration approval, PAPSS CEO Mike Ogbalu said on the sidelines of a conference in Cairo earlier this month. The link-up would let Egyptian traders settle with African counterparts in local currencies rather than relying on USD, cutting the cost and time it currently takes to route a payment through a correspondent bank. The launch timeline and names of the banks that applied were not disclosed.

What is PAPSS? Launched in 2022, the PAPSS platform facilitates cross-border payments under the African Continental Freetrade Area (AfCFTA). AfreximBank provides settlement guarantees and overdraft facilities to settlement agents. The goal is to cut the cost and time of cross-border payments, reduce liquidity requirements for commercial banks, and strengthen central bank oversight. The system now runs across nearly 30 African nations, covering over 200 commercial banks, fintechs, and payment service providers, and connects to 16 domestic payment switches. The CBE agreed to join in November 2024.

How it works: Today, an Egyptian importer paying a counterparty in, say, Kenya typically routes the payment through a correspondent bank using the USD as an intermediary — a chain that adds cost, delay, and USD demand at every step, senior economist and macro analyst Islam Magdy explains to EnterpriseAM. PAPSS replaces that with a more direct flow. “The payer can initiate the transaction in their domestic currency while the beneficiary receives the equivalent value in their local currency, subject to the participating institutions and applicable FX arrangements,” digital economy expert Mai Hegazi tells us.

Egypt’s Africa trade architecture: Egypt signed the AfCFTA back in 2018, and the treaty entered into force in May 2019. Actual trading started in October 2022 with the AfCFTA Guided Trade Initiative. Egypt is also a member of the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (Comesa) and has ratified the Tripartite Freetrade Area — the agreement linking Comesa, the East African Community, and the Southern African Development Community — which came into force in July 2024. The country became a member of Brics in 2024.

What’s in it for Egypt?

Egypt runs a trade surplus of around USD 3.2 bn with PAPSS member countries — a sharp contrast to the deficits it runs with its top trade partners, including China (c. USD 18 bn), the US (c. USD 10 bn), the GCC (c. USD 3.1 bn), and Europe (c. USD 700 mn), according to trademap data compiled by Magdy and shared with us. At a moment when Egypt needs every foreign currency inflow it can get, removing friction from one of the few trading relationships already tilted in its favor “has a strategic value that exceeds its current absolute size,” he says.

Overall, Egypt accounted for 4.35% of intra-African trade in 2025, reaching around USD 9.59 bn — about 46% growth from its 2022 total of USD 6.57 bn, according to AfreximBank’s African Trade Report 2026 (pdf). Its main export markets on the continent were Algeria, Libya, Morocco, Sudan, and Tunisia, while its import sources were the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa. The country’s top exports to the continent were cement and construction materials, plastics, and milled products. Its main imports were copper, fuel and mineral oils, and agricultural commodities, the report shows.

The scale caveat: Our trade with PAPSS member countries is around USD 3.9 bn in exports — under 8% of Egypt’s total exports, Magdy notes. Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia account for over two-thirds of that sum, and these North African countries already have functional settlement channels. That makes the near-term window narrower than the Sub-Saharan growth story PAPSS is usually framed around, he says.

SMEs stand to benefit most: “For SMEs, this could be particularly meaningful because they typically have less access to sophisticated correspondent banking and multi-currency infrastructure than multinational corporations,” Hegazi says. Also, Egyptian importers could gain from cheaper, more predictable payments to African suppliers, Magdy argues.

Will it break our dependence on the greenback? The short answer is no. PAPSS reduces the need for USD as an intermediary, but “it does not eliminate the USD’s role in global trade, reserves, international pricing, or financial markets,” Hegazi explains. It also doesn’t affect the country’s FX balance, since “the real impact is on transaction costs and settlement speed, not on the FX balance,” Magdy adds.

Both ends need building

InstaPay was built as a domestic instant payments rail, and “it does not currently support cross-border transactions directly, so a cross-border gateway layer needs to be built,” Magdy says. PAPSS itself is still maturing as well: it changed its settlement model after relying on central banks for funding caused delays, and now it lets commercial banks handle payments directly under central bank supervision, he explains.

Looking ahead

Connecting PAPSS to all Egyptian banks is a near-term priority, Ogbalu said, adding that Egypt’s share of PAPSS cross-border volume could reach 60-70% within five years. Beyond InstaPay, PAPSS is developing an integration with Meeza cards to enable their use across African nations. But Magdy notes that “Meeza cards don’t work for international purchases or with cards issued outside Egypt, which limits card-based integration options and pushes the model toward account-to-account transfers instead.”

Egypt is not a marginal participant: As one of the largest economies in the PAPSS network, how the InstaPay integration works “could influence how the system is calibrated for other large economies joining later,” Magdy says. The commercial prospect goes beyond transactions to the banking layer around them: trade finance, FX, liquidity management, supply-chain finance, and cross-border collections, Hegazi says.

For now, though: “PAPSS addresses payment friction — it does not address commercial risk, credit risk, or country risk. An exporter still needs confidence they will get paid, and an importer still needs access to trade finance,” Magdy concludes.