What PAPSS actually is
PAPSS (the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System) is a payment rail, built by the African Union with Afreximbank, that lets a bank in Nigeria pay a bank in Ghana directly in local currencies — you send naira, your counterpart receives cedis, and no US dollar changes hands in between. For a Nigerian freelancer invoicing a Ghanaian client, or an SME paying a supplier in Accra, that means skipping the old route entirely: naira → domiciliary dollars → correspondent bank in New York or London → cedis, with a spread and a delay charged at every hop.
As of February 2026, this stopped being theoretical for Nigeria specifically. Onafriq Nigeria Payments Ltd, a CBN-licensed payment service provider, partnered with PAPSS to launch what both companies describe as the continent's first wallet-based outbound payment pilot from Nigeria to Ghana — built with banks and mobile money operators on both sides (Onafriq, ITEdgeNews).
How a naira payment turns into cedis, without a dollar leg
The mechanics matter because they explain why it's actually cheaper, not just marketed as cheaper. A payment instruction moves from your Nigerian bank, through the Central Bank of Nigeria, into PAPSS, which routes it to the Bank of Ghana and then to the beneficiary's Ghanaian bank — paid out in cedis. Settlement between the two countries doesn't happen transaction-by-transaction; PAPSS nets everything Nigerian institutions owe Ghanaian ones (and vice versa) and squares only the residual balance, with Afreximbank acting as settlement agent and guarantor (Payments Signal; coverage of the mechanism also summarized by BusinessDay). That's the actual dollar-bypass: hard currency is only needed for whatever's left over after netting, not for every gross transfer. PAPSS advertises settlement in well under two minutes once a payment is initiated (PAPSS).
Who can use it today: the Onafriq pilot, banks and apps
PAPSS itself is not an app you download — it's rail that sits behind your existing bank. In Nigeria, it's reachable through more than 22 banks at branch level, and directly inside several banking apps: Access Bank's AccessMore, UBA's LEO, Sterling's SterlingPro, and Wema's ALAT, among others. UBA, Zenith, Access, Sterling, Stanbic IBTC and Ecobank are all connected on the Nigerian side, with Ghanaian counterparts including GCB, CalBank and Ecobank Ghana. Beyond the naira-cedi corridor, PAPSS has been expanding fast — connecting close to 19–30 countries as of mid-2026, more than 160 commercial banks and 14 national payment switches, with a stated goal of reaching around 38 countries by the end of the year (TheCable).
The Onafriq pilot specifically is what makes it "wallet-based": rather than only bank-to-bank, individuals and merchants can also move money through mobile money wallets on both ends, which matters for smaller Ghanaian suppliers or clients who bank informally through mobile money rather than a commercial bank account (We Are Tech).
What it costs and how much you can move
Published, transaction-level fee schedules aren't yet standard across every participating bank — expect them to vary by institution rather than be fixed centrally by PAPSS. What is consistent across coverage is the order of magnitude: PAPSS and Afreximbank cite cost savings of up to roughly 90% versus routing the same payment through correspondent banks and a dollar conversion, because you're no longer paying two FX spreads and a SWIFT fee stack.
On limits, expect friction-free sending for smaller amounts and paperwork above it. Individual transfers are generally processed without extra supporting documents up to the naira equivalent of about $2,000 a month, and single transactions to Ghana are capped around 10,000 cedis — beyond either threshold, your bank will ask for invoices, contracts or other proof of the underlying transaction. Confirm current limits with your own bank before relying on this for a specific invoice, since PAPSS coverage and thresholds have been changing quickly through 2026.
Why this matters if you invoice or pay across Africa
If you're a Nigerian freelancer with a client in Accra, or an SME importing raw materials or reselling goods from a Ghanaian supplier, the old workaround was almost always to ask for payment in dollars, hold it in a domiciliary account, then convert — absorbing a spread twice and waiting days for a correspondent bank to clear the funds. A working naira-cedi rail removes both of those costs and most of the wait. It's also one instance of a bigger shift: PAPSS is the payment leg meant to make the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) actually usable for day-to-day trade, not just tariff policy (AfCFTA).
What PAPSS still can't do — the honest limits
Don't treat this as a finished, universal system yet. Four years after launch, adoption has been genuinely uneven — some banks are connected but rarely used for this purpose, and reporting from late 2025 flagged real obstacles to businesses actually routing volume through PAPSS instead of familiar dollar channels (WeeTracker, TechCabal). The wallet-based pilot with Onafriq is, as of writing, specifically a Nigeria-to-Ghana corridor and still described as a pilot — not yet a guarantee that every bank, every amount, and every counterparty will work smoothly on day one. For other African countries, PAPSS exists but runs through your regular bank's cross-border transfer option, not a dedicated wallet flow, and coverage still depends on whether both your bank and your counterparty's bank have actually switched it on.
How to actually use it this week
Ask your bank directly whether PAPSS is live on your account — for the banks named above, it's usually a transfer option already inside the app (look for "Africa transfer," "PAPSS," or a Ghana-specific naira option) rather than something you need to apply for separately. If your bank doesn't support it yet, that's worth asking about explicitly, since coverage is expanding bank by bank through 2026.
For tracking the money itself once it moves — a naira payment sent, a cedi invoice paid, a supplier relationship in a second currency — Kampe is built for exactly that kind of multi-currency picture: it aggregates what you hold and owe across currencies and gives you one honest number and a plan, without ever touching or moving the underlying funds itself. The corridor gets you a cheaper, faster payment; keeping an honest running total of what's actually in each currency is a separate job, and one worth not doing in your head.