The Bank of Ghana is testing cross-border payments with Nigeria and Rwanda that combine central bank digital currencies, stablecoins, bank accounts and mobile wallets, Governor Johnson Pandit Asiama announced on Tuesday, 13 October, on the sidelines of the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in Bangkok.
The trials cover the Ghana-Nigeria and Ghana-Rwanda corridors. They are meant to determine whether several forms of money can move from one country to another without passing through correspondent banks outside the continent. The central bank also says it has extended the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System, PAPSS, to mobile wallets on the corridor with Nigeria.
The trials precede a possible commercial launch, the date of which has yet to be announced. The Bank of Ghana plans to rely on PAPSS to move the tests towards operational services.
Reducing the detour through the dollar
The governor presents interoperability as a way for a trader in Accra to pay a supplier in Lagos in local currency, without prior conversion into dollars or use of a foreign correspondent bank. He said the cost of some payments between African countries still exceeds 8%, far from the international target of 3%.
The stakes are particularly high for small businesses, which use mobile wallets more than traditional banking services. PAPSS already operates as a local-currency settlement infrastructure, and its public offer in Nigeria lists participating banks and mobile wallets. The Ghanaian trial seeks to extend this logic beyond largely bank-based settlements.
The domestic market gives Ghana a large user base for testing these uses. Mobile money transactions exceeded one billion operations in August 2026, for a value of 519 billion cedis, up 46.5% year on year, according to figures presented by Johnson Pandit Asiama. The governor nevertheless considers that access to a financial service, which covers 81% of adults, does not always translate into regular and appropriate use, the effective inclusion rate being estimated at 52.7%.
The Bank of Ghana is also working with the National Bank of Rwanda on a licence passport scheme for regulated financial companies. The mechanism is meant to spare fintechs from repeating the same procedures in each country. More than ten other states are in talks to join this approach, according to the governor.