At the Kenya Blockchain and Crypto Conference, fintech leaders painted a clear picture of where Africa’s payments ecosystem is heading.This will include faster, cheaper and increasingly invisible.
From stablecoins to mobile money infrastructure, the consensus was that blockchain is no longer a fringe experiment as it is becoming core financial infrastructure.
Freddie Omany, Country Director-Kenya, Pawapay, said one of the most practical use cases already in production is in settlement.
He revealed that traditional cross-border settlement timelines can sometimes take up to four days. This has already been reduced to near-instant using crypto rails.
“We’ve seen settlement times move from four days to instant. That’s a big shift.”
Crypto is increasingly acting as a backend layer and is not replacing mobile money. This ensures faster reconciliation and cross-border flows.
This is critical in Africa, where millions of microtransactions flow daily across fragmented systems.
Felix Macharia, Co-Founder & CEO, Kotani Pay, said a less talked-about driver is the access to dollars.
He explained that Kotani Pay initially focused on humanitarian payments, where microtransactions (as low as $1) made traditional rails too expensive.
Stablecoins have over time emerged as a practical solution for financial stability and accessibility and not just because of cost, especially during economic stress.
Stablecoins are being used to bridge gaps in dollar access across African markets.
Ali Hussein Kassim, the CEO, AHK Growth Partners broke down the ecosystem into layers and made it clear that the real opportunity is deeper than consumer apps.
According to him, the stack now includes core infrastructure (rails and blockchain layers), distribution (telcos, fintechs, banks), traditional financial systems and an intelligence layer (data, AI, orchestration)
His biggest takeaway was, “We are moving towards zero fees in payments.”
That shift fundamentally changes the business model for fintechs. If payments become free, companies will need to monetize adjacent services, not transactions themselves.
Nick Mwendwa raised a critical tension regarding compliance vs. speed. The technology offers instant transfers but regulatory requirements can slow that down.
The result is a system that is improving, but still constrained.
Omany emphasized that in high-volume ecosystems like mobile money, even minutes of downtime can translate into massive financial losses.
“Five minutes of downtime can mean thousands of failed transactions.”
As a result, fintech infrastructure providers are investing heavily in uptime, system resilience and real-time visibility for users.
Despite the hype around blockchain, Macharia framed the shift as evolution, not replacement.
Traditional systems like mobile money, banks, and card networks are being augmented by crypto infrastructure and are not disappearing.
The future will likely have mobile money as the interface, have crypto power the backend and users will not even notice the difference.
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Also Read: M-PESA’s Jason Masai: “Too Much Fintech Innovation Doesn’t Work for Everyday Users”
