The 10th Central Bank Payments Conference concluded in Istanbul on September 2, bringing together central banks, policymakers, financial institutions and payments industry leaders to explore how the payments landscape is evolving. I had the opportunity to take part in a panel on “The Regulatory Conundrum,” where we explored how the role of central banks is evolving as new technologies, changing business models and geopolitical developments reshape the payments landscape.
For me, one thing became clear throughout the discussion: payments regulation is changing significantly, but not necessarily because the objectives of regulators have changed. Rather, the environment in which central banks pursue those objectives has become far more complex.
Technology, Geopolitics and the Changing Regulatory Landscape
The velocity of technological change has been one of the biggest drivers of this shift. We are living through a period of extraordinarily rapid technological transformation. Consider that it took around 110 years to move from the first Industrial Revolution, driven by steam power, to the second, driven by electricity. By contrast, digital innovations such as mobile wallets, instant payments, central bank digital currencies, stable coins, tokenized assets and cloud infrastructure have spread at remarkable speed over the past 25 years.
This acceleration has changed business models across financial services and created a paradigm shift that traditional banking rules and regulatory frameworks cannot always fully absorb. Regulators have therefore had to constantly learn, adapt, and find the right balance between enabling innovation and maintaining financial stability. If regulation is too restrictive, it can stifle innovation. If it is not strong enough, the risks of fraud, market losses, and consumer harm increase.
Yet I don’t believe the fundamental objectives of regulation have changed. Central banks and regulators still care about financial stability, consumer protection, financial inclusion, and security. What has changed is the speed at which these objectives have to be delivered.
In an environment where payments happen in a second, fraud can happen in that same second. Consumers can also lose trust just as quickly. There has also been another important shift. In recent years, payment rails have increasingly come to be seen as strategic and critical digital public infrastructure. The conversation is no longer only about how fast or how innovative payments can be. We also must think about resilience, sovereignty, sanctions, data governance, and geopolitical risk.
Whether we like it or not, geopolitical forces have increasingly affected the way payment systems are designed and operated. Central banks have had to balance investment in payment infrastructure with questions about national security, economic stability, and resilience. This has meant that decisions around cloud infrastructure, cross-border payments, regulatory harmonization, and data governance have become increasingly interconnected. Technology and policy have been reshaping not only how money moves, but also who can participate in the digital economy and who risks being left behind.
At AfricaNenda, where we work to advance inclusive instant payment systems, two questions have remained particularly important to us: how do we drive greater interoperability in a fragmented ecosystem, and how do we strengthen consumer trust in increasingly digital, automated and AI-driven payment ecosystems?
The goals of regulation have not fundamentally changed. What has changed is how complex the job of financial regulators has become. There are more actors, more dependencies, and more risks to consider. Payments now sit at the intersection of technology, economics and geopolitics, and regulators increasingly must reconcile all three.
Cross-Border Payments: From Faster Transactions to Greater Inclusion
I have worked on cross-border payment issues for many years, and it was encouraging to reflect on how much progress has been made during the panel discussion. The good news is that we have made real gains, particularly on speed and transparency. Many countries now operate real-time payment systems. At AfricaNenda, our annual State of Inclusive Instant Payment Systems (SIIPS) research has tracked these developments across the continent. Today, 40 countries across Africa have access to domestic instant payment system functionality, while four regional instant payment systems are enabling cross-border payment capabilities.
International efforts, including the G20 Roadmap for Enhancing Cross-Border Payments, have also helped drive greater attention to common standards for messaging and APIs, as well as better visibility around fees, transaction tracking and payment status. This represents significant progress compared with when I first started working on remittances in 1998.
But while we have made strong progress in moving money faster, the biggest gaps remain affordability and inclusiveness. Cross-border payments, particularly for micro small and medium enterprises MSME and migrants” African markets, can still be too expensive and too complex. Many people continue to rely on informal mechanisms because formal channels do not always meet their needs.
From a policy perspective, one of the biggest opportunities for Africa is to interlink domestic and regional instant payment systems to enable seamless cross-border payments. The African Continental Free Trade Area, together with its Digital Trade Protocol, provides a strong foundation for greater regulatory cooperation and harmonization. But we still face significant structural barriers.
These include a lack of risk-proportionate cross-border licensing frameworks that allow smaller providers to compete, conflicting customer due diligence requirements, disparate anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism regimes, burdensome foreign exchange controls, stringent and inconsistent data localization requirements, and a lack of regulatory certainty and consistency across jurisdictions.
Collectively, these barriers limit competition, increase transaction costs, and diminish the benefits that digital payments can deliver to consumers, businesses, and economies. The challenge before us is therefore not simply how to move money faster. It is how we make cross-border payments as affordable, interoperable, and accessible as domestic payments.
This is an area where AfricaNenda actively contributes to the conversation. We started a series of workshops bringing together private-sector actors including commercial banks, mobile money operators, cross-border payment fintechs, instant payment infrastructure providers and development partners to build a shared understanding of the complexity of the problem, identify barriers to seamless cross-border payments, and explore what regulators could do and how the private sector could engage in meaningful public-private dialogue.
Our first workshop brought together stakeholders from East and Southern Africa in Johannesburg, South Africa, in April 2026. We then brought together Francophone West African stakeholders in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, and our next engagement for Anglophone West Africa is scheduled to take place in Lagos, Nigeria, in September 2026.
We have been sharing the findings from these engagements with the African Association of Central Banks and amplifying the conversation across the wider payments’ ecosystem. We have also undertaken research into the feasibility of an African regulatory harmonization framework for cross-border payments. So, is it feasible?
Our report will be released in the coming months, and I look forward to sharing the findings and continuing the conversation. The discussions at the Central Bank Payments Conference in Istanbul reinforced that the future of payments will not be shaped by technology alone. It will be shaped by the interaction between technology, regulation, economics, and geopolitics.
