Every few months, another African payment system announces that it now talks to everyone else’s.
PesaLink links to PAPSS. Ghana’s GhIPSS bridges banks and mobile wallets. Tanzania’s TIPS promises to unify a fragmented market.
The press releases are confident. The lived experience, when you go looking for it, is messier.
Kenya’s cross-network transfers fail in specific, recurring ways. In December 2025, Airtel Kenya confirmed a service disruption in the exact channel that lets M-Pesa users send money into Airtel Money wallets.
The companies described it as a technical failure in the interoperability layer, not a one-off glitch.
Support guides for the M-Pesa-to-Airtel route now routinely warn users about timeouts caused by “system communication issues” between the two networks, and advise people to simply retry if a transfer stalls.
That’s an admission that the cross-network path is less reliable than an on-network one.
There’s also a security dimension nobody advertises. Reporting this year traced a wave of unauthorized M-Pesa deductions to Paybill 585555, the specific number that routes off-net deposits into Airtel Money as part of the 2022 interoperability rollout.
Users described money leaving their accounts without confirmation messages or consent.
Whatever the root cause, the incident shows that interoperability isn’t just a UX question.
Bridging two systems built independently, under separate security assumptions, creates attack surface that neither operator fully owns.
PesaLink has a narrower but real gap: registration. Its own FAQs state that “Send to Phone” only works if the recipient is registered on PesaLink; otherwise the transaction fails outright.
Recipients can still receive money via “Send to Account,” but that requires the sender to have a full account number, which defeats the promise of moving money as easily as a phone number.
For a rail that has processed over a trillion shillings in value, this is a persistent, structural friction point rather than a bug.
Pricing parity is also inconsistent with the official story. Kenya’s central bank required, back in 2018, that cross-network mobile transfers cost no more than on-network ones.
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Reporting since has found telcos applying different tariff structures anyway, with Airtel running a flat rate and Safaricom’s fees varying more by amount.
On PesaLink’s side, this year’s fee war (nineteen banks now waiving charges under KES 1,000 and capping larger transfers at a flat KES 20) doesn’t apply universally.
Five of Kenya’s ten largest banks, including Equity and Co-operative Bank, haven’t adopted it.
A customer’s actual cost depends heavily on which bank they hold an account with, something official comms rarely spell out clearly.
Ghana is the interesting counterexample. Independent assessments, including AfricaNenda’s regional inclusivity reporting, rank GhIPSS’s Instant Pay and its Mobile Money Interoperability service as functioning together without the friction seen elsewhere, and credit Ghana as the only African country with genuinely interoperable multiple instant payment systems.
Tanzania’s TIPS, by contrast, is described even in its own promotional materials as still working against a fragmented market where interoperability between providers “has been limited.”
The pattern across all three countries is the same. Interoperability announcements describe an end state.
The actual experience depends on registration requirements, uneven fee adoption, timeout-prone technical bridges, and security gaps at the seams between systems that were never designed together.
None of this shows up in a press release. It shows up in support tickets, telco statements issued after something breaks, and the fine print of FAQ pages.
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