Stakeholders in the fintech industry have urged the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) and African fintech payment platforms to collaborate in a bid to create unified policies that streamline the flow of funds within Africa.
This was made known on Friday at the graduation of the third cohort of Kora, a digital payment platform skill acquisition academy.
“PAPSS needs to get on a roundtable with payment operators in Africa and come up with a unified policy that could guide the free flow of funds across Africa with proper tie-ins with commercial banks necessarily,” Chukwuma Ukegbu, sales and partnerships manager at Kora, said.
He said that policies, public relations with key players and stakeholders across Africa’s payment platforms are important to generate what is required.
“I think that the PAPPS can easily boost Africa’s economy in terms of payments saving African businesses up to $5 billion in transactions each year,” he added.
Read also: 5 African banking groups adopt PAPSS for cross-border transactions
PAPSS, which was launched by African Union and Afreximbank in 2022 to make cross-border transactions seamless, has brought over 25 commercial banks onto its system.
Oluwatimi Adesoji, head of backend engineering at Kora who spoke on digital payments within Nigeria, said digital payments in Nigeria have been made easy by the proactiveness of regulators like NIBSS.
“I think we’ve innovated a lot even beyond most African countries because of what payment infrastructure like NIBSS has done. Now, in Nigeria, we can send payments, and it’s almost instant. We rarely have that in others,” he said.
He revealed other areas where there can be improvements such as compliance-wise, which would be more collaboration of regulators with the financial institutions.
“I would say regulatory bodies should just keep working with financial systems to just fine tune and innovate more. we also need to keep growing, we also need to keep improving because the financial space is massive,” Adesoji added.
Kora solutions so far have played a pivotal role in expanding markets and nurturing innovation for businesses. By providing a seamless cross-border payment API for businesses, the company has made cross-border transactions and expansion smoother and more efficient for Africans.
Speaking on tech skills development, David Ojimba, engineering lead, frontend at Kora, said a skill gap in engineering training is being able to tie their technical skills right now to business needs.
“A lot of people are not able to tie their technical skills right now to business needs, they don’t see a big picture focused approach to tech rather than just the tech for tech sake,” he said.
He said Kora through its talent programme The Curve has tried to imbibe how to tie technical skills to business needs with this set of cohorts.
“For example, we had a hackathon, and aside from criticising their technical skills, system, app, engineering, and architecture. We discussed how they came about those ideas, their reasoning behind it, and their business model.”
