The corridor connecting West and East Africa’s most active payments markets has never lacked for ambition. For years, the operational reality — fragmented licensing regimes, incompatible rails, dollar-intermediated settlement — kept pan-continental payment aspirations at the PowerPoint stage. In the first sixty days of 2026, three events changed the structural picture: Kenya and Rwanda signed an EAC Payment Service Provider passporting MOU, eliminating one regulatory barrier to corridor entry; Moniepoint acquired Sumac Microfinance Bank, giving Nigeria’s largest fintech a Kenyan banking licence and the legal footprint to operate in East Africa; and Wise secured a Nigerian International Money Transfer Operator licence from the Central Bank of Nigeria, ending years of operating through third-party intermediaries. Five categories of player are now converging on the same corridor. The question is which of them actually has the infrastructure, approvals, and unit economics to own it.

What the EAC Passporting MOU Actually Unlocks

The Kenya-Rwanda PSP passporting MOU is the most structurally significant of the three events, and also the most misunderstood. It does not create a single East African payments market overnight. What it establishes is a legal framework under which a payment service provider licensed in either Kenya or Rwanda can apply for a passported licence in the other jurisdiction — bypassing the full domestic licensing process. For a cross-border payments player, that means one regulatory approval can now serve two of the EAC’s most commercially active markets simultaneously.

The broader context is the EAC Cross-Border Payment System Masterplan, approved by the Community’s Monetary Affairs Committee in May 2025. That Masterplan sets out a three-stage path toward full regional payments integration: harmonised mobile money regulation, mutual PSP licence recognition, and ultimately a regional instant retail payments switch. The Kenya-Rwanda MOU is the first bilateral implementation of Stage 2. Tanzania, Uganda, and Burundi are the natural next signatories — Tanzania’s regulators have been among the most engaged with the Masterplan framework, and the Bank of Tanzania already has contactless transaction limits codified in regulation ahead of broad NFC deployment.

For a company like Moniepoint, which has just acquired a Kenyan banking licence, the MOU is immediately actionable. A bank that holds a CBK licence and an Rwandan PSP licence — even a passported one — has the legal structure to operate an EAC corridor. The question is whether Moniepoint moves to apply.

Moniepoint’s East Africa Bet

Moniepoint’s acquisition of Sumac Microfinance Bank in Kenya is the most strategically loaded move in African fintech this year. The company, which built its dominance in Nigeria by targeting small business payment acceptance and working capital — not the consumer remittance segment — is making a calculated bet that the same model works in East Africa.

The Sumac acquisition gives Moniepoint a Kenyan microfinance banking licence, CBK regulatory standing, and the local compliance infrastructure to begin merchant-side payments operations. That is not a remittance play. It is a merchant acquiring and SME financing entry — precisely the segment where Moniepoint’s Nigerian margins are highest and where East African competitors, M-PESA included, have historically been weakest on credit.

The corridor implication is secondary but real. Once Moniepoint operates a licensed bank in Kenya, the structural plumbing for Nigeria-Kenya business payment flows exists. A Nigerian exporter paying a Kenyan supplier — or a Kenyan importer settling a Nigerian manufacturer — has access to a single fintech counterparty with licences in both markets. That is a different value proposition than consumer remittance, and it is aimed squarely at the formal SME segment that incumbent banks have underserved on both sides of the corridor.

The unanswered question is speed. Moniepoint’s Nigerian operation is a decade of accumulated merchant relationships and credit data. In Kenya, it is starting from a Sumac MFB balance sheet that, as of end-2025, carried a loan book of approximately KES 2.8 billion and roughly 35,000 active borrowers, according to CBK regulatory filings at the time of acquisition. Scaling that into a business that challenges Equity Bank’s SME franchise requires more than a banking licence. It requires a distribution infrastructure that Moniepoint does not yet have in East Africa.

Wise, NALA, and the Direct-Licence Race

Wise’s Nigerian IMTO licence resolves a structural disadvantage the company had operated under for years. With nearly £600 million in transfers facilitated into Nigeria while running on third-party IMTO rails — a figure disclosed in Wise’s published transfer data for the UK-Nigeria corridor — Wise had demonstrated product-market fit but was constrained in its ability to price down the corridor. Operating through intermediaries who held the licence and the rails meant Wise bore the cost of intermediation that its direct-to-consumer model is built to eliminate.

With its own IMTO licence, Wise can now connect directly to NIBSS — Nigeria’s Inter-Bank Settlement System — and quote the mid-market rate without the margin premium that third-party settlement required. On a UK-Nigeria corridor that moves approximately $3.5 billion annually, and where traditional transfer channels still charge 3 to 6 percent per transaction, Wise’s direct entry as a price anchor reshapes the competitive economics for every operator in the market.

Wise is not alone in this approach. NALA secured its own CBN IMTO licence and NIBSS integration earlier this year, operating from a UK-Africa product that is designed specifically for the diaspora-to-home-market corridor. The convergence of multiple direct-licence fintechs on the same Nigeria inbound corridor is not a coincidence — it reflects how well the CBN’s revised January 2024 IMTO guidelines cleared the path for competitors willing to commit to the full licensing process.

The West-to-East corridor — Nigeria to Kenya and beyond — is the frontier neither Wise nor NALA has yet addressed. That corridor moves predominantly business payments, not diaspora remittances, and requires relationships on both the sending and receiving sides that Moniepoint is better positioned to build.

M-PESA’s Defensive Position

M-PESA’s response to the corridor competition is not a new product or a licensing push. It is a data policy change that raises the cost of competing. The Safaricom decision to begin masking sender phone numbers in M-PESA transactions — Phase 1 from March 24, 2026; merchant payments to follow by year-end — removes a piece of informal KYC infrastructure that every PSP operating on M-PESA rails has used for years. A full phone number visible in a transaction confirmation was East Africa’s most widely used informal identity signal. Masked or withheld, it forces competitors to build formal verification infrastructure — tokenisation, device fingerprinting, or biometric KYC integrations — that Safaricom’s own platform already has.

The effect on corridor entrants is asymmetric. M-PESA processes 137.9 million daily transactions, worth KES 118 billion. Any cross-border player routing payments through M-PESA on the receiving end now faces higher KYC friction than incumbents who already operate tokenised identity layers. For Moniepoint building a merchant KYC stack from scratch in Kenya, it is an additional compliance cost. For Equity Bank, which has operated on Kenyan rails for decades with its own identity infrastructure, it is a marginal adjustment.

MTN MoMo: Ambition, Compressed Budget

MTN Group’s MoMo platform remains the most geographically distributed payments infrastructure in Africa — present across 17 markets, 60 million active monthly users, $28 billion in transaction value in FY2025. The corridor ambition was explicit: MTN CEO Ralph Mupita’s February 2026 investor briefing flagged a $2 billion fintech acquisition war chest aimed at product depth in lending, savings, and East Africa market fill.

The $2.2 billion IHS Towers acquisition, announced six weeks later, consumed approximately 60 percent of that war chest in a single infrastructure deal. The remaining ~$800 million is the discretionary M&A capital MTN carries into the next 18 months for the fintech acquisitions that MoMo’s corridor gap requires. That is acquisition-scale for a single mid-sized African fintech — not the transformational multi-market deployment the MoMo platform narrative requires. MTN’s corridor ambitions have not changed. Its execution budget has.

The Unit Economics Question

The underlying economics of cross-border payments in Africa remain structurally unattractive compared to the headline narrative. The World Bank’s Remittance Prices Worldwide database records an average Sub-Saharan Africa send cost of 7.8 percent per transaction as of Q4 2025 — nearly three times the UN Sustainable Development Goal target of below 3 percent. The East Africa corridor performs better than the continental average — the Kenya-Uganda and Kenya-Tanzania corridors benchmark closer to 4 to 5 percent on digital channels — but the Nigeria-to-East-Africa business corridor still frequently settles above 5 percent when dollar intermediation, correspondent banking costs, and FX conversion are stacked.

The player that solves that cost stack wins. It requires owned rails in both markets — not correspondent banking partnerships — and enough settlement volume to compress FX spread to a competitive level. On current trajectories, only Moniepoint and MTN MoMo have the prospect of dual-market balance sheets. Moniepoint needs scale in East Africa. MTN needs the capital it has now largely deployed elsewhere.

BETAR Assessment

No single operator owns the pan-African payments layer in 2026, and none will own it cleanly by 2027. What is crystallising is a two-corridor reality: the consumer remittance corridor (diaspora-to-Africa, primarily UK-Nigeria and US-Kenya) is being won by direct-licence fintechs — Wise, NALA, and the next tier of CBN-licensed operators — where price and regulatory access are the decisive variables.

The business payments corridor (Nigeria-to-East-Africa SME flows, EAC trade settlement) is structurally uncontested and structurally harder, requiring licensing in multiple jurisdictions, SME relationships on both sides, and owned settlement rails. Moniepoint, if it executes in Kenya and leverages the EAC passporting framework for a Rwanda or Uganda licence next, is the best-positioned player in that corridor for 2026. MTN MoMo retains the broadest coverage but has constrained its execution capital at the moment it matters most. M-PESA defends its East African home market through infrastructure control, not product expansion. The corridor race is live — the outcome is not.

— Business Desk, BETAR.africa