December 18, 2025
European fintech overwhelmingly focuses on transatlantic and intra-EU payment flows. Africa is treated as a future market, always five years away from being ready. The transaction data we see suggests this assessment is a decade behind reality.
We process transactions into 14 African markets. Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, South Africa, and Senegal together account for 19% of our total transaction volume by count. Average order values are lower than EU-to-EU transactions but not dramatically so. More importantly, repeat purchase rates from African buyers are higher than our EU average. Buyers who overcome the friction of international checkout tend to come back.
Mobile money — M-Pesa in East Africa, Wave in West Africa, MTN Mobile Money across multiple markets — has created a payments infrastructure that is in many ways more advanced than European bank transfer systems for consumer purchases. The challenge is connecting European merchant platforms to these networks. That connection now exists via API integrations that were not available commercially three years ago.
The barriers are not consumer demand or payment technology. They are merchant-side decisions: not enabling mobile money as a checkout option, not localizing pricing into relevant currencies, and not solving the shipping complexity for destinations that lack reliable postal infrastructure in some regions but have excellent courier coverage in urban centers. Merchants who solve these three things unlock markets their competitors have not touched.
Currency volatility is a real concern in some African markets. The Nigerian naira, for example, has experienced significant devaluation cycles. Merchants who sell in EUR and collect in EUR via international card payment are largely insulated from this. The risk is highest for merchants who price and settle locally. Understanding which settlement model you are using matters more than which markets you choose to enter.
First-mover advantages in international e-commerce tend to be durable. Buyers develop preferences for merchants who were accessible when others were not. European merchants who enter African markets now, solve the friction, and build relationships are unlikely to be easily displaced by competitors who wait until the market is more convenient.