By: Nadudzi Ametewee, Country Manager and Growth Lead, Ghana, Yellow Card
A payment sent from Australia to Spain can now arrive in as little as 23 seconds. Transfers from Australia to India have taken 37 seconds, while payments from China to the United States have arrived in about a minute. These are examples of what SWIFT’s new Retail Payments Framework is making possible.
The framework has gone live with 26 financial institutions processing payments across 25 corridors and 17 countries. It promises customers greater certainty around fees, the ability to track payments from start to finish, confirmation when funds arrive, and faster settlement where local systems allow.
There is, however, one detail worth paying attention to. None of the 17 countries in the initial rollout is in Africa. This is not to suggest African financial institutions lack connectivity to global networks. The issue lies not in access to messaging systems, but in the region’s exclusion from this initial phase of the upgraded payments architecture.
What the framework actually offers
Before getting to Africa’s absence, it helps to understand what SWIFT’s framework is actually doing, because the substance matters.
The framework addresses three things that have long frustrated people sending money across borders: unpredictable fees, poor visibility into where a payment is, and slow final delivery. Under the new framework, participating banks commit to upfront pricing, full transaction traceability, and near-instant settlement where domestic infrastructure allows.
These are not small improvements. Anyone who has sent money abroad and watched the amount shrink between initiation and arrival, with no clear explanation of where the difference went, knows exactly why these matter.
Transparency on fees and exchange rates, confirmation when funds arrive, payments that complete in seconds rather than days; these are things people have wanted for a long time.
The cost of moving money across Africa
Cross-border payments are not an abstract infrastructure issue for Africa. They affect families receiving money from relatives abroad, small businesses, companies, and traders moving goods across African borders.
Sub-Saharan Africa records the highest average cost to send money of any region in the world. The World Bank’s Remittance Prices Worldwide report for the third quarter of 2025 put the average cost of sending $200 to Sub-Saharan Africa at 8.46%, the highest among the regions it tracks. For households and small businesses that depend on remittances, the difference between receiving $183 and the full value of a $200 transfer matters; costs can accumulate and affect cash flow, margins, and the ability to trade.
The challenge is not only the cost of sending money. Customers also need to know when it will arrive, how much the recipient will receive, and where a payment is if something goes wrong. Swift’s framework addresses several of these concerns.
What is already happening on the ground
One of the most useful questions to ask is what African markets need to do to participate in, and benefit from, this changing payments landscape.
Parts of what the framework promises already exist in Africa, built by African and Africa-focused companies that did not wait. Stablecoin-powered platforms have been operating in this space for years. Yellow Card, one of such platforms, is a licensed stablecoin-based infrastructure provider and payments provider that supports more than 50 currencies, with deep coverage across emerging markets, including some of the world’s most complex regulatory environments. Users can send and receive money across 20 African markets using Yellow Card’s infrastructure.
This is, however, not to frame a choice between SWIFT and stablecoins.
Beyond SWIFT’s framework for improving the experience of payments through participating banks, SWIFT itself is developing a blockchain-based ledger to support digital asset exchange and future cross-border transactions, with 17 institutions preparing to pilot live transactions using tokenised deposits.
That is an acknowledgement that the Stablecoin infrastructure offers another set of tools for businesses and financial institutions.
Both approaches have a place in a financial system where different payment needs require different solutions. The priority should be making these systems reliable, accessible and capable of working together.
Because the next generation of payment infrastructure already runs on different rails and roles.
The case for building, not waiting
There are two ways this story could go. In the first, Africa waits. More corridors get added to the SWIFT framework, African banks eventually sign on, and the continent benefits from the infrastructure and adopts it later. That has been the pattern in several areas of financial services.
In the second, the current gap becomes a catalyst for something more durable. African fintechs, regulators, and financial institutions use this moment to build the payment infrastructure the continent actually needs, designed for local currencies, local corridors, and local users, and interoperable with global systems.
The regulatory environment is moving in that direction. Following Ghana’s passage of the Virtual Asset Service Providers Act in December 2025, the Bank of Ghana and the Securities and Exchange Commission are actively establishing a licensing framework and regulatory sandbox. Kenya similarly enacted its VASP legislation in October 2025 and has subsequently published detailed regulatory guidelines. Meanwhile, Nigeria brought digital assets under SEC oversight through the Investments and Securities Act 2025, building on momentum in South Africa, where licensing for crypto asset service providers has been in place since 2022.
Africa should help set the next standard
The Swift framework is a useful benchmark. It shows what good cross-border payment infrastructure looks like in practice: fast, transparent, and built around the user rather than the institution. Africa deserves that standard.
Africa has strong reasons to pursue the same improvements because its remittance costs remain high, its businesses need more effective ways to move money across borders, and its markets are becoming increasingly connected to global commerce.
African banks, fintechs, regulators and payment infrastructure providers have an opportunity to work together on solutions that meet the continent’s needs and connect them to the rest of the world.
Stablecoin-powered platforms like Yellow Card can form part of that effort, alongside improvements to existing banking and payment systems. Africa does not need to wait for someone else to deliver the standard. It can help write it.
