Mastercard Achieves Record 45% Expansion in Africa’s Digital Payments Infrastructure, Positioning Continent for $1.5 Trillion Market by 2030

Mastercard has grown its acceptance network across Africa by 45 percent in 2025 – a major milestone that brings millions more consumers and small businesses into the continent’s fast-expanding digital economy. This accelerated progress underscores the strong advancement of digital payments, technology, and innovation in Africa—a transformation that traditionally would have taken several years to accomplish. The surge comes in a year defined by new market entries, significant investment, product innovation, and an expanded on-ground presence—efforts that reinforce Mastercard’s role in powering Africa’s projected $1.5 trillion digital payments market by 2030.

The expansion represents more than mere numerical growth; it signals a fundamental shift in how African consumers and businesses engage with the formal financial system. As Mark Elliott, Division President for Africa at Mastercard, stated: “2025 has been a defining year for Mastercard in Africa. From acceptance growth to new digital capabilities, our focus has been on solutions that bring people and small businesses into the heart of the digital economy.”

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Strategic Geographic Expansion and Local Capacity Building

Over the past two years, Mastercard has accelerated its Africa expansion, opening new offices in Ghana, Uganda, and Mauritius, with further markets set for launch in 2026. The company grew its employee base by almost 20 percent across the continent, strengthening local capabilities and enabling co-creation of solutions tailored to the needs of African communities and merchants.

The Ghana office opening represents Mastercard’s commitment to supporting the country’s growing digital economy by providing innovative financial products and services tailored to the market. The new Accra office expands the company’s African footprint alongside existing offices in Cairo, Casablanca, Johannesburg, Lagos, Nairobi, and Mauritius. The strategic expansion reinforces dedication to driving a sustainable digital economy that creates lasting benefits across Africa.

Folasade Femi-Lawal, Country Manager and Area Business Head for West Africa at Mastercard, emphasized that Ghana presents a tremendous opportunity to enhance geographical presence in West Africa. “West Africa is one of the continent’s fastest-growing digital corridors,” Femi-Lawal noted. “Mastercard’s security-led innovations and acceptance expansion helped more SMEs and young entrepreneurs access modern payments.”

The physical presence across multiple African markets enables Mastercard to develop deeper understanding of local market dynamics, regulatory frameworks, and consumer preferences. This localization strategy contrasts with purely centralized approaches and allows for more nuanced product development and partnership structures that reflect the diversity of African markets.

Advanced Digital Infrastructure Development

Alongside its footprint expansion, Mastercard advanced key digital infrastructure—including tokenization upgrades, digital identity capabilities, and virtual card enhancements—to bolster trust, safety, and convenience across online and in-person payments. These technological advancements address critical friction points in digital payment adoption, particularly concerns around security and fraud that have historically constrained consumer confidence in digital transactions.

Gabriel Swanepoel, Country Manager for Southern Africa, highlighted the region’s technological leadership: “With South Africa driving Mastercard’s real-time payments capability globally, 2025 was a breakthrough year for innovation. Our collaboration on digital identity further strengthened secure, frictionless digital commerce.”

The tokenization technology replaces sensitive card information with unique digital identifiers, reducing fraud risk in card-not-present transactions that are increasingly prevalent in e-commerce environments. Digital identity capabilities enable more seamless customer onboarding while maintaining robust know-your-customer compliance standards. Virtual card enhancements facilitate secure online transactions and provide additional control mechanisms for both consumers and merchants.

These infrastructure investments create network effects that benefit the entire payments ecosystem. As security and convenience improve, consumer adoption accelerates. As consumer adoption grows, merchant acceptance expands. This virtuous cycle drives the exponential growth in digital payment volumes that Mastercard projects for the coming years.

Small and Medium Enterprises at the Center

SMEs—Africa’s economic backbone—are a top focus. With consumer spending expected to rise across major markets—Kenya 4%, Morocco 3.4%, Nigeria 6%, South Africa 1.9%—demand for digital tools has surged among SMEs seeking to accept payments seamlessly, access credit, and strengthen financial resilience.

Mastercard has launched 15 new SME-focused programs in the past 18 months, including collaborations across multiple markets. In South Africa, partnerships are driving financial inclusion through both financial institution and non-financial institution channels, unlocking growth, addressing access-to-credit constraints, and empowering thousands of SMEs to scale and grow with confidence.

In Morocco, Mastercard co-developed the country’s first Digital Marketplace with BCP (Banque Centrale Populaire), the Ministry of Handicrafts, and Paysky, benefiting 2.3 million artisans. This initiative represents a significant step toward formalizing and digitalizing a traditionally cash-based sector, providing artisans with access to broader markets, transparent pricing, and digital payment acceptance.

Nigeria has seen the introduction of QR-on-Card solutions with UBA and WEMA enabling 1.8 million SMEs and gig workers to accept seamless payments. Additionally, USD cards with Zenith Bank are supporting over 50,000 SMEs with effortless cross-border trade, addressing a critical pain point for businesses engaged in international commerce who have historically faced foreign exchange constraints and complex international payment processes.

Partnerships in Kenya, Mauritius, and Tanzania are empowering more than 200,000 SMEs with digital solutions, demonstrating the scalability of Mastercard’s SME-focused initiatives across diverse market contexts. The cumulative impact of these programs extends beyond individual business growth to encompass broader economic development objectives including job creation, tax formalization, and supply chain digitization.

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Community Pass Initiative Targets Rural Digital Access

Mastercard is leveraging its Community Pass initiative to increase digital access in underserved and rural areas, with a target to register 15 million users in Africa within five years. The initiative has already reached 1.2 million smallholder farmers in Uganda, demonstrating the potential for digital identity and payment solutions to extend financial inclusion beyond urban centers.

The Community Pass platform combines biometric identification with digital payment functionality, enabling rural populations to establish verifiable digital identities that can be used across multiple service providers. This infrastructure addresses a fundamental barrier to financial inclusion—the lack of formal identification documentation that excludes millions of Africans from accessing financial services, government programs, and formal employment opportunities.

For smallholder farmers specifically, digital identity and payment systems facilitate access to agricultural inputs, credit, insurance, and market linkages that can significantly improve productivity and income. The Mobilizing Access to the Digital Economy (MADE) Alliance, launched in May 2024, exemplifies this approach. The alliance has enabled affordable high-speed internet and digital training for 13 cooperatives in Kenya reaching over 10,000 farmers, launched Farm Pass deployment to digitize profiles of more than 80,000 farmers, and built capacity for 250,000 farmers through local cooperative partners.

These rural-focused initiatives recognize that Africa’s digital economy cannot reach its full potential if it remains concentrated in urban areas. Rural populations represent substantial untapped markets for digital services and simultaneously face some of the most acute challenges in accessing traditional financial services due to geographic remoteness, low population density, and limited infrastructure.

The $1.5 Trillion Digital Payments Opportunity

Africa’s digital payments economy is set to grow from strength to strength according to a Mastercard-commissioned report by Genesis Analytics stating that the digital payments economy is expected to reach $1.5 trillion by 2030. This projection reflects rapid migration from cash to digital wallets, cards, and account-to-account payment rails across consumer and merchant ecosystems.

The forecast is driven by multiple converging trends. First, increasing access to mobile and broadband internet is unlocking new opportunities across the continent. As more people come online, the adoption of digital payment solutions is growing rapidly, enabling secure and convenient financial transactions even in remote areas. Second, financial services are reaching more unbanked and underbanked populations than ever before. Digital wallets, mobile money platforms, and agent banking are helping millions of Africans participate in the formal economy, creating a broader base for digital payments.

Third, Africa’s internet penetration and financial inclusion are growing, supported by declining smartphone costs, expanding telecommunications infrastructure, and increasingly favorable regulatory frameworks for digital financial services. The combination of these factors creates conditions for exponential rather than linear growth in digital payment adoption.

Mohamed Benomar, Country Manager for North West Africa, emphasized regional dynamics: “North Africa’s expanding fintech ecosystem and strong infrastructure make it a critical engine for digital commerce. Mastercard’s investments strengthen support for governments, consumers and SMEs alike.”

Strategic Partnerships Accelerating Growth

Mastercard is partnering with banks, telcos, and other service providers across Africa and internationally to help accelerate fintech growth and expansion in new markets. For example, Mastercard’s partnership with M-Pesa in Kenya and MTN Group Fintech has enabled millions of unbanked individuals to access digital financial services through mobile money platforms.

These partnerships recognize that no single player can drive digital financial inclusion alone. Effective ecosystem development requires collaboration between payment networks, banks, mobile network operators, fintech startups, merchants, and government regulators. Mastercard’s strategy leverages its global technology infrastructure and brand recognition while enabling local partners to deliver contextually appropriate solutions.

The collaboration with digital wallet providers and e-commerce platforms has facilitated the integration of payment solutions into digital ecosystems, enabling seamless transactions for consumers and merchants alike. Mastercard’s global Fintech Express program provides fintech companies with an end-to-end experience for card issuance, combining identity, biometric, artificial intelligence, and open banking capabilities to protect consumers across the spectrum of internet and payments scams.

Local partnerships such as the recent agreements with Africa’s Access Bank and Equity Bank are enabling Mastercard to make cross-border payments more simple, convenient, and accessible. These partnerships enable customers in multiple markets to make cross-border payments globally via bank accounts, mobile wallets, cards, and cash—addressing the fragmented nature of African payment systems and reducing friction in intra-African trade.

Artificial Intelligence and the Next Digital Frontier

Mastercard predicts that technologies such as AI and agentic commerce will define the next era of commerce, with Africa’s AI market projected to reach $16.5 billion by 2030. This represents another dimension of digital transformation beyond payment infrastructure, encompassing applications in fraud detection, customer service, credit scoring, and personalized marketing.

Artificial intelligence technologies offer particular promise for African markets where data scarcity and infrastructure gaps have traditionally constrained financial services delivery. Machine learning models can extract signals from alternative data sources—mobile phone usage patterns, utility payment histories, social network analysis—to assess creditworthiness for populations without traditional credit histories. Natural language processing can enable customer service in multiple local languages without requiring extensive human call center infrastructure. Computer vision can facilitate document verification and authentication in contexts where physical infrastructure for in-person verification is limited.

Shehryar Ali, Senior Vice President and Country Manager for East Africa and Indian Ocean Islands, highlighted the region’s leadership position: “East Africa continues to lead the world in digital financial inclusion.” This leadership provides a foundation for early adoption of AI-powered financial services, creating opportunities for African markets to leapfrog certain stages of financial infrastructure development that characterized digital finance evolution in developed economies.

Looking Ahead: 2026 and Beyond

In 2026, Mastercard will continue advancing financial inclusion, expanding across markets and introducing more locally relevant digital solutions—all while investing in the infrastructure needed to support a more secure and connected African economy. The company’s commitment reflects recognition that digital payment infrastructure development is a multi-year journey requiring sustained investment, continuous innovation, and adaptive partnerships.

The projected trajectory from current acceptance network growth to the $1.5 trillion digital payments market by 2030 implies continued expansion at rates that would have been considered exceptional in more mature markets. Achieving this trajectory requires addressing multiple parallel challenges: infrastructure development, regulatory evolution, consumer education, merchant onboarding, and fraud prevention. Mastercard’s integrated approach—combining physical presence, technology development, partnership facilitation, and targeted initiatives for underserved segments—positions the company to play a catalytic role in this transformation.

As Africa positions itself as a global technology and fintech leader, the projected surge in digital payments offers immense opportunities not only for economic growth but also for financial empowerment and inclusion. The transformation from cash-based to digital payment ecosystems has implications extending far beyond payment convenience to encompass tax formalization, credit access, supply chain transparency, and integration into global commerce networks.

Mastercard’s 45 percent acceptance network expansion in 2025 represents both achievement and acceleration point. The infrastructure, partnerships, and capabilities developed through this expansion create foundations for further exponential growth as network effects intensify. For millions of African consumers and small businesses, the expansion translates into tangible improvements in financial access, transaction convenience, and economic opportunity—bringing the promise of digital financial inclusion closer to reality across the world’s second-largest and second-most populous continent.

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By: Montel Kamau

Serrari Financial Analyst

18th December, 2025