The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), in partnership with African deep-tech company Interstellar, has launched the PAPSS African Currency Marketplace (PACM), a continent-wide liquidity pool designed to address Africa’s long-standing challenges of currency inconvertibility and high foreign exchange costs.
The new financial market infrastructure was announced on the sidelines of the Afreximbank Annual Meeting (AAM2025) held in Abuja from June 25 to 28.
The PAPSS African Currency Marketplace aims to unlock trapped capital, eliminate multi-week settlement delays, and reduce the estimated $5 billion in annual costs African businesses incur when relying on hard currencies to trade with neighbouring countries.
Mike Ogbalu III, Chief Executive Officer of PAPSS, said the launch is a strategic evolution of the PAPSS platform, which has connected 17 African countries, 14 national switches and over 150 commercial banks since its inception in 2022.
“By creating a single, continent-wide liquidity pool, PACM serves as a powerful liquidity engine for intra-African commerce,” Ogbalu said. “Corporations, airlines, reinsurance firms, and multinationals operating across Africa have long struggled with trapped capital due to limited currency convertibility. The PAPSS African Currency Marketplace directly addresses this hurdle.”
The currency marketplace is fully transparent and order-book driven, operating under strict compliance with national regulatory frameworks and international best practices.
Built on Interstellar’s enterprise-grade, blockchain-agnostic infrastructure, the platform enables direct peer-to-peer exchange of African currencies without passing through external reserve currencies such as the US dollar or euro.
During its pilot phase, over 80 African corporations transacted across 12 currency pairs, with transactions settled in local currencies in near real-time. Notable early use cases include airlines such as Kenya Airways, which now use PACM to convert revenues in Nigerian Naira directly into Kenyan Shillings, avoiding external exchange costs and delays.
Haytham El Maayergi, Executive Vice President at Afreximbank, highlighted the platform’s role in advancing the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) goals.
“The PAPSS African Currency Marketplace gives us the power to transform trade dramatically, bringing us to trade with each other with a major benefit that we can now accept each other’s currency,” he said.
Speaking at the launch, Interstellar Founder and CEO Ernest Mbenkum described the platform as part of a larger effort to secure Africa’s financial independence.
“PAPSS and Interstellar are not just collaborators — we are co-architects of a new financial future. This is about building rails for Africa’s own currencies to move value instantly and securely,” Mbenkum said.
Industry stakeholders have long argued that Africa’s fragmented currency system and dependence on external clearing mechanisms hinder economic competitiveness and capital mobility.
According to PAPSS, the African Currency Marketplace unlocks this bottleneck by consolidating local currency liquidity into a unified pool, lowering costs for businesses and investors.
Following positive feedback from early adopters, PAPSS says it has received interest from institutions outside Africa seeking to connect to the new marketplace. The platform is now open to qualified corporates, banks and financial institutions across the continent.
Ogbalu reiterated PAPSS’s commitment to building a resilient, sovereign financial infrastructure for Africa.
“This is about transforming Africa’s financial landscape so that capital can move freely and efficiently, powering intra-African trade and unlocking new economic opportunities,” he said.
