While enterprise capital chased shopper apps, the true battle for Africa’s digital economic system moved behind the scenes. In an in-depth dialog, the Managing Director of Morocco’s Switch Al-Maghrib, Hanae Ben Driss, argues that nationwide fragmentation is a prerequisite for sovereignty, explains why wallets trump playing cards for cross-border scale, and divulges plans for an affiliation of African nationwide switches. GODFREY GEORGE reviews
Across the African continent, venture capital decks and tech keynotes have lengthy championed the front-end revolution: modern cellular banking interfaces, shopper lending apps, and digital storefronts.
Yet behind this veneer of shopper comfort lies a persistent, irritating structural actuality. A traveller flying from Lagos to Luanda finds their worldwide payment playing cards repeatedly declined when paying for primary transit visas; transferring funds between two neighbouring North and West African jurisdictions stays an costly, multi-day ordeal involving middleman offshore clearing banks; and domestic retail commerce stays stubbornly tethered to bodily banknotes.
For the architects of the continent’s underlying monetary plumbing, the obsession with consumer-facing software program has obscured the foundational work required to make cash transfer.
Few operators perceive this friction higher than the management of Switch Al-Maghrib, Morocco’s nationwide payment change.
Operating quietly inside the engine room of North African finance for practically three a long time, the establishment sits on the nexus of business banks, non-bank monetary establishments, and the central financial institution.
“Our position at Switch Al-Maghrib is interesting because we usually work behind the scenes,” Hanae Ben Driss, the Managing Director of Switch Al-Maghrib, Morocco’s nationwide payment change, explains. “We are part of the less visible but very important components of the value chain. We are infrastructure providers, and we are not client-facing or involved in business-to-consumer activities. However, our work is essential to making the entire ecosystem function.”
With practically three a long time within the business, the Switch Al-Maghrib chief provides an unconventional perspective on what growth establishments routinely lament as Africa’s payment “fragmentation”: the existence of separate nationwide payment rails shouldn’t be a coverage failure however the very important first step in the direction of continental sovereignty.
Speaking on the sidelines of continental business deliberations, Hanae Ben Driss supplied a basic reframing of the talk: what international observers dismiss as inefficient market fragmentation is, in actuality, the required first chapter of African monetary sovereignty.
The case for domestic sovereignty
In growth circles and coverage conferences, Africa’s distinct nationwide switches and regulatory silos are incessantly considered as obstacles to the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). Switch Al-Maghrib’s management challenges that framing instantly.
“You used the word fragmentation, but I may change your perspective on that,” she says. “Fragmentation can actually be the first step towards building things locally, which we subsequently need to make interoperable. If you do not have local infrastructure in the first place, there is nothing to make it interoperable.”
The argument for native infrastructure is rooted in political and monetary self-determination. Without nationwide possession of core switches, nations stay uncovered to exterior shocks and the strategic whims of offshore multinational schemes.
“Every country needs to have sovereign control over its critical infrastructure,” she insists. “These are the foundations upon which we are building the digital economy and payment systems. We should not simply be dependent on an international actor whose objectives may not necessarily align with national priorities. For me, sovereignty is not negotiable.”
Crucially, sovereignty doesn’t require each African state to code each system from scratch or manufacture proprietary {hardware}. “Sovereignty does not necessarily mean that every country must independently develop every component of its infrastructure,” she notes. “What matters is that each country retains control over the evolution and management of its systems.”
She is equally clear that Africa can’t merely carbon-copy the European Union’s mannequin of top-down integration.
“Africa is not Europe or the United States. We do not have the same political framework for achieving that kind of integration,” she notes. “We can take a different approach. We can build these infrastructures country by country and subsequently agree on how to connect them. That is another way of building an interconnected system.”
Morocco pioneered this mannequin greater than twenty years in the past. Long earlier than the present fintech growth, Moroccan industrial banks joined forces to construct a unified domestic interbank change, which Ben Driss stated went dwell round 2005.
“One of the earliest initiatives was to ensure that domestic transactions could be processed locally,” she recollects. “What this means is that when a domestic transaction takes place, where both the cardholder and the merchant are located in Morocco, the transaction no longer needs to go through international schemes outside Morocco. Even when the payment card carries the logo of an international brand, the domestic transaction can be processed locally. That was an important first step towards achieving greater sovereignty.”
An affiliation of African nationwide switches
While domestic sovereignty has taken root in markets like Morocco, Nigeria, Ghana, Rwanda, and Angola, cross-border interoperability stays painfully gradual. Multilateral platforms just like the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) and PAPSSCARD have established a high-level regulatory framework, however Switch Al-Maghrib believes technical operators should now take the initiative.
To speed up that actuality, Switch Al-Maghrib stated it’s working to forge direct operational ties with its friends throughout the continent, with a watch towards creating a proper continental coalition.
“We are already in contact with our counterparts in different African countries, particularly national switches,” she reveals. “We have relationships with the national switches in Nigeria, Ghana, Rwanda and other markets across the continent. We are progressively building relationships with these institutions, and there is a shared vision of establishing an association of African national switches.”
The goal of the affiliation is sensible, not bureaucratic: to determine technical interoperability between domestic rails with out ready a long time for political treaties to harmonise.
“The objective is to create a framework through which we can collaborate and focus on connecting payment infrastructures,” she says. “This does not necessarily mean establishing a continental political or regulatory framework similar to the European Union. Rather, it means creating an effective mechanism for connecting our payment systems.”
Having a unified institutional voice has additionally grow to be pressing as international expertise races forward. With the rise of synthetic intelligence and agentic commerce—the place autonomous software program brokers execute transactions on customers’ behalf—remoted African markets threat turning into irrelevant if they continue to be fragmented.
“Even Europe is struggling to establish sufficient technological independence to compete with the United States and China, which are driving developments in artificial intelligence,” she warns.
“For Africa, therefore, it is important that we come together… Otherwise, it will become increasingly difficult to develop viable solutions at the national level, let alone across the continent.”
Why wallets beat playing cards for cross-border scale
When exploring tips on how to join nationwide switches, the disparity between card networks and cellular wallets turns into instantly obvious.
Traditional payment playing cards stay constrained by the inflexible guidelines, clearing hubs, and interchange charges of multinational networks like Visa and Mastercard.
“Even if we decide tomorrow to connect our international clearing national switch, we cannot simply make every Visa or Mastercard cross-border payment across continents remain so difficult despite decades of conferences and commitments, the boss of Switch Al-Maghrib and strategies.”
Digital cellular wallets, nonetheless, current a much more agile route for intra-African commerce.
“Wallets present a different opportunity,” she explains. “If we decide to connect the Nigerian wallet ecosystem with the Moroccan wallet ecosystem, we have greater autonomy to establish that connection because we are not necessarily dealing with an international card scheme. That gives us an opportunity to develop our own interconnected payment arrangements.”
By linking digital wallets instantly throughout nationwide borders, African switches can allow instantaneous, account-to-account funds that bypass worldwide clearing rails altogether.
“Technology is only 20% of the equation”
When requested why cross-border funds throughout continents stay so troublesome regardless of a long time of conferences and commitments, the boss of Switch Al-Maghrib dismisses the concept of a technical barrier.
“I would definitely not say it is technological,” she asserts. “Technology represents only about 20 per cent of the equation in initiatives of this nature.”
Nor does she view political resistance as the first bottleneck. Instead, the true problem lies within the advanced, resource-intensive work of regulatory execution whereas managing domestic structural hurdles.
“Every country has its own domestic priorities and challenges,” she explains. “Whether you are talking about Morocco, Nigeria or Angola, the situation is similar. The measurement of financial inclusion and cash is still very dominant. Countries are dealing with these domestic challenges while also trying to find the time and resources to establish cross-border connections.”
Rather than ready for central banks to design technical frameworks, she argues that change operators should be proactive.
“Regulators are not necessarily technology experts, and that is understandable,” she says. “When you are dealing with technological infrastructure, regulation alone is not sufficient. I believe we should not simply wait for regulators to take the initiative… we, as infrastructure providers, manage the technological systems and should take the initiative to make proposals to regulators. We have the flexibility and agility to move faster.”
Beyond self-importance financial institution accounts
This pragmatic method extends to how monetary inclusion is measured. While policymakers incessantly level to the variety of newly opened financial institution accounts as proof of progress, she argues that account metrics are superficial.
“For me, financial inclusion goes beyond the number of bank accounts,” she says. “It is about having access to a digital financial record through which institutions can access your risk profile when you need a loan. Whether that record comes from a traditional bank account, a payment account, or a digital wallet does not necessarily matter.”
True inclusion, she argues, is about financial resilience and poverty alleviation. “I strongly imagine that monetary inclusion helps fight poverty. When individuals have a monetary monitor report, they’ll entry loans and credit score underneath extra beneficial circumstances.
“Can we establish whether you have savings? Do you regularly pay your bills? Do you have a consistent financial record? These are the indicators that help an institution determine whether you are reliable enough to access credit. The objective of financial inclusion is to make people’s lives better and make them less vulnerable.”
The greatest barrier to creating that digital report stays the dominance of money within the casual economic system, the place merchants routinely demand bodily notes over digital transfers.
She factors out that this reluctance is deeply tied to fiscal belief and the social contract: “It is also connected to taxation. If I accept a digital transfer, I become visible within the financial system. My revenues can be tracked, and I may have to declare my income and pay taxes. But what am I getting in return for paying those taxes? Am I receiving quality education, healthcare and other public services? These issues are interconnected. We cannot look at payments in isolation.”
Because money gives instant certainty and fee-free liquidity, digital options should supply compelling advantages in security and service provider comfort to compete.
“We cannot simply expect merchants to change their behaviour,” she notes. “It is our responsibility, as payment infrastructure providers, to innovate and make digital payments more attractive.”
To construct that belief, Switch Al-Maghrib stated it has built-in synthetic intelligence instantly into its nationwide routing engine to supply real-time, ecosystem-wide fraud scoring, democratising high-end cyber defence for each related establishment.
“One of the advantages of having this capability at the national switch level is that we can share the cost across the ecosystem,” she explains.
“Rather than every individual institution having to develop the same capabilities independently, we can provide a centralised service. For every transaction passing through the switch, whether it originates from a bank or a mobile money institution, we can assess the risk in real time. This allows us to strengthen the security of the entire payment ecosystem.”
For Africa’s payment panorama, the message from Driss is evident: integration won’t descend from a single continental decree, nor will it’s solved by front-end apps alone. It shall be achieved by sovereign domestic switches that construct native resilience, take possession of their rails, and forge direct, pragmatic alliances throughout borders.
“One of the beautiful things about Africa is that we are a community,” she displays. “When I talk about national switches in Nigeria, Angola, Ghana and Rwanda, I am talking about institutions that share similar challenges. We are essentially dealing with the same problems… There is a lot we can learn from one another through benchmarking and sharing experiences.”
