Regional payment upgrades expose need for interoperable digital identity
CategoriesBiometrics News | Financial Services
The Bank of Central African States (BEAC) has rolled out some initiatives lately which suggest a coordinated push aimed at enhancing its contributions to the building of trusted digital payment infrastructure within the Central African sub-region. BEAC is the banking regulator for six countries that make up what is called the CEMAC bloc, namely Cameroon, Chad, the Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and the Republic of Congo.
According to the bank’s leadership, these initiatives are intended not only to facilitate digital payment transactions among member states, but also to accelerate the push towards a regional financial inclusion target of 60 percent by 2029 and 75 percent by 2032.
In July, the bank launched what it described as a CEMAC QR code system, a platform designed to allow payments across participating banks and mobile money wallets with transactions routed and cleared through regional payments operator GIMAC, which already runs an interoperable payments system, GIMACPAY.
Its key feature is interoperability as the code works for merchant payments regardless of which bank is used. A user needs to scan it using their smartphone at a point-of-sale to make a payment. BEAC Governor Yvon Sana Bangui said at the launch event in Cameroon’s economic capital Douala that the platform is a major step towards the central bank’s efforts to modernize the sub-region’s financial infrastructure for secure and interoperable payments.
Early last month, BEAC, in partnership with instant payments firm ProgressSoft, also launched an upgrade to a centralized electronic clearing platform for retail payments dubbed SYSTAC 2. Authorities described the platform as future-ready with a yet-to-be-activated module that can support real-time payments.
For now, the system facilitates the processing of everyday low-value payments across the CEMAC region, and handles a variety of transactions namely credit transfers, card payments, and checks. The system has the participation of 59 commercial banks, six national treasuries, and six national BEAC directorates. SYSTAC 2 works alongside SYGMA V10, BEAC’s upgraded Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) system, which handles large-value and interbank settlements.
Continental digital payments
Still in July, BEAC announced it had formally joined the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), a continental digital payments initiative promoted by the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). This gives CEMAC a connection to the continent-wide infrastructure for cross-border payments and settlements, potentially linking the six countries of the sub-region more closely to payment systems elsewhere across Africa.
According to BEAC authorities, the CEMAC QR Code is designed to complement this accession to the PAPSS, as it is intended to help standardize merchant and wallet identification, thereby preparing the interface between domestic retail payments and this new continental infrastructure for cross-border flows. The rollout of the QR code comes after a pilot in Gabon which was described as successful.
With these efforts, BEAC is seen to be trying to strengthen interoperable payments within CEMAC, and at the same time connecting the sub-region to the wider continental digital payments infrastructure. Just after the PAPSS integration, Cameroon’s Minister of Trade, Luc Magloire Mbarga Atangana, issued a statement calling on enterprises to take advantage of the move to boost their AfCFTA business engagements.
PAPSS is a major initiative intended to support the AfCFTA’s African single market vision. Experts said in an interview with Biometric Update in December last year that interoperable digital public infrastructure such as digital ID systems can potentially bring out the full value of the single market idea.
Harmonized eKYC, identity layer?
The efforts by BEAC to enhance payments interoperability are commendable. However, there have been concerns about whether that can really scale if digital Know Your Customer (eKYC) remains fragmented across the region. This question raises another important one. Should the next focus be to develop a shared identity layer to support those transactions?
According to the AfCFTA’s Digital Trade Protocol and its Annexes, trusted digital trade among African nations requires interoperable digital identity, authentication, trusted credentials, and interoperable digital transactions.
For the moment, there is no common digital ID initiative within CEMAC, even as evidence exists that interoperable digital ID schemes in other parts of the continent such as in Ethiopia and Nigeria have substantially driven financial inclusion. Nigeria has even been recognized as an AfCFTA Trade Champion, partly because of its robust identity infrastructure.
Although CEMAC member states have national ID systems, none of them has a fully digital identity infrastructure. eKYC by banks in member countries is still done separately, whereas a harmonized approach could drastically cut costs as seen elsewhere.
The idea of an interoperable African digital ID has been on the table for some time, including at the Internet Governance Forum 2025. West Africa has been exploring avenues for implementing something similar at a regional level. At the ID4Africa AGM 2026, stakeholders made the case for interoperable regional digital ecosystems as the next frontier of Africa’s digital transformation.
ID4Africa Executive Chairman, Dr. Joseph Atick, in an interview with Biometric Update in 2024, explored how identity is a critical layer in building financial inclusion within CEMAC and beyond.
So, as cross-border transactions grow with increasingly high volumes of mobile money transactions for example, the next challenge for CEMAC would be how to enable banks, merchants, and regulators to trust who is on the other end of every payment, possibly using a common digital ID. Whether that identity layer emerges through BEAC, GIMAC, national digital ID systems, or the broader AfCFTA digital trade agenda remains an open question.
Article Topics
Africa | African Union | Cameroon | cross-border data sharing | digital identity | digital payments | interoperability | KYC | QR code
