Digital Finance For AI-Driven Economies: Africa’s Role In The Next Phase Of Cross-Border Commerce

By Mthokozisi Dlamini, Managing Executive: Transactional Banking Sales, Absa CIB and

Richard Southey, Managing Executive: Payments as a Service, Absa CIB

Africa’s relevance to the evolution of global finance is significant. The continent’s experience, particularly in cross-border payments, provides a glimpse into what tomorrow’s increasingly digital, data-driven global financial system could look like.

As artificial intelligence (AI), automation and real-time data reshape how businesses make decisions, manage supply chains and deploy capital, the infrastructure that moves money across borders must evolve too. The question is no longer simply how quickly a payment can move. It is whether financial infrastructure can provide the intelligence, interoperability, liquidity and trust required to support an increasingly real-time global economy.

Africa is already confronting many of these challenges. Its financial landscape spans more than 50 economies, multiple currencies, regulatory regimes, payment systems and levels of digital maturity. That complexity creates friction, but it has also made the continent an important environment for financial innovation.

Mobile money, agency banking, digital identity and alternative payment solutions demonstrate how innovation in response to local needs can achieve much wider relevance. The next opportunity is to connect these innovations across borders in ways that support trade, inclusion and trusted financial participation.

Initiatives such as the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), SADC regional clearing arrangements and interoperability programmes in East and West Africa are already creating opportunities to reduce friction and connect markets. But building more payment rails is only part of the answer. The next phase of digital finance will depend on making different rails work intelligently together.

For Absa CIB, operating across and connecting clients into diverse African markets provides a close view of this evolution. Our experience suggests that solving for cross-border commerce requires more than technology alone. It requires the combination of regional connectivity, local-market knowledge, liquidity capability and trusted financial infrastructure to help clients navigate different currencies, regulations and payment environments.

African clients increasingly expect to know where a payment is, what it will cost, when it will arrive and what is required to complete it successfully. As payments become faster and increasingly instant, those expectations create new challenges for banks. Liquidity has to be managed more dynamically, fraud must increasingly be prevented before a transaction takes place rather than detected afterwards, and payment data needs to become richer and more useful. Institutions must also make decisions across multiple currencies, markets and regulatory environments in real time.

This is where AI and intelligent automation have an increasingly important role to play. Better use of data can support predictive liquidity forecasting, transaction monitoring, automated exception management and proactive fraud prevention. Standards such as ISO 20022 can provide richer transaction information, while APIs can connect payment, treasury and client platforms more effectively.

But the real opportunity is not automation for its own sake. It is combining intelligent technology with trusted financial infrastructure.

That distinction matters. In financial services, speed cannot come at the expense of governance, compliance or security. AI may help institutions make faster and better-informed decisions, but those decisions still need to operate within strong regulatory and risk frameworks. This is particularly important as instant and increasingly irreversible payments require fraud controls to move from detection and recovery towards prediction, prevention and real-time intervention.

The future of cross-border finance is also unlikely to be defined by one winning payment technology. Traditional correspondent banking, instant payment systems, regional settlement networks, tokenised deposits, regulated stablecoins and potentially central bank digital currencies could coexist for some time.

The challenge is therefore interoperability. A payment system that is exceptionally fast within one closed network but difficult to connect to another does not solve the wider problem of cross-border commerce. Financial institutions need to connect different systems while managing liquidity, foreign exchange, settlement risk, regulation and financial-crime controls.

This means correspondent banking is not necessarily disappearing. It is being reinvented.

The correspondent bank of the future is less of a passive intermediary and increasingly a trusted connector across financial ecosystems, helping clients navigate multiple payment rails, currencies and jurisdictions while providing liquidity, market access, transparency and regulatory confidence. This is particularly relevant in Africa, where local-market knowledge remains critical even as financial infrastructure becomes more digital.

For businesses, the significance of this evolution extends well beyond moving money faster. Many multinational organisations operating across Africa have traditionally maintained multiple banking relationships, prefunded local accounts and held significant working-capital buffers because of uncertainty around payment timing, liquidity and currency availability.

As regional financial infrastructure becomes more connected, businesses may be better positioned to improve cash visibility, manage liquidity more dynamically, ease working capital constraints and make more efficient use of working capital. That makes digital finance an enabler of cross-border commerce, not simply payments.

It can support businesses seeking to transact across African growth corridors with greater certainty, connect African markets more effectively to global supply chains and advance the broader ambitions of regional integration and intra-African trade.

At Absa CIB, we believe this also changes where competitive advantage is likely to sit. It is unlikely to sit only with the institutions that move money fastest. It is more likely to sit with those that can combine technology, liquidity, market knowledge and regulatory strength to help clients move money and conduct business with confidence.

Africa’s complexity is often described as an obstacle to financial integration. It can also be viewed differently.

The continent is already learning how to connect markets that have different currencies, regulations, infrastructure and levels of technological maturity. It is developing regional payment systems while remaining connected to global correspondent networks. And it is balancing demand for faster digital finance with the realities of liquidity, regulation, financial crime and local-market execution.

Those challenges are becoming increasingly relevant beyond Africa as the global financial system becomes more fragmented and technologically complex. The next phase of innovation will therefore not be driven by a single technology, payment rail or institution. It will increasingly be built through ecosystems that connect banks, fintechs, infrastructure providers, regulators and clients.

As AI makes commerce more automated, data-driven and real time, the financial infrastructure underneath it will need to become more intelligent without becoming less trusted.

Africa’s experience gives it a distinctive perspective on how that future could work. The lesson is that the future of cross-border finance is not simply faster. It is more connected, more intelligent and more interoperable, with trust at its core.

That could prove to be one of Africa’s most valuable contributions to the next era of global finance.