By Bradley Elliott, CEO of RelyComply and Mladen Čolić (pictured), Head of FinTech at TransUnion 

Africa is building one of the fastest-growing instant payment ecosystems in the world. But while transaction speeds now move in seconds, fraud detection frameworks still operate in minutes, hours, or even days. This gap is creating a dangerous asymmetry: payments are becoming real-time, while risk management often is not.

According to the State of Inclusive Instant Payment Systems in Africa (SIIPS) 2025 Report, 36 instant payment systems were live across 31 African countries, up from 31 the previous year, demonstrating rapid growth in coverage and adoption. Collectively, these systems processed approximately 64 billion transactions worth nearly USD 2 trillion in 2024, underscoring the scale and acceleration of real-time digital payments across the continent. The report also highlights growing interoperability, with nearly half of systems linking banks, mobile money platforms and FinTechs, while Nigeria’s NIBSS Instant Payments became the first system in Africa to achieve a “mature” level of inclusivity.

Building on this momentum, pan-African initiatives such as the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) are accelerating cross-border interoperability, further increasing the scale and complexity of real-time transaction flows. While these innovations are creating a faster and more connected financial ecosystem, the same qualities that make instant payments powerful – increasing transaction speed, growing network complexity and the rise of interconnected digital finance systems – are also shrinking fraud detection windows to mere milliseconds.

Speed without intelligence becomes a liability

The rise of instant and cross-border payments has created a perfect storm of speed, scale and increasingly sophisticated fraud. We’re seeing fraudsters exploit identity vulnerabilities, synthetic IDs, SIM swap fraud and advanced account takeover (ATO) techniques to bypass traditional controls. When payments settle instantly, institutions don’t have hours or days to detect suspicious activity; they have milliseconds.

In South Africa, the real-time payments market is forecast to grow from USD 0.57 billion in 2025 to approximately USD 2.75 billion by 2030, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of around 34%. Consumers increasingly expect instant onboarding, frictionless transactions and rapid issue resolution, while regulators are intensifying scrutiny around Anti-Money Laundering (AML), sanctions screening and Know Your Customer (KYC) obligations. Together, these pressures are forcing financial institutions to rethink traditional compliance approaches and adopt smarter, real-time risk intelligence capabilities.

Compliance used to work in a reactive, often siloed way. Too often it was treated as a late-stage checkpoint, brought in near the end of product development to surface regulatory issues, instead of being a strategic partner shaping decisions from day one. That approach no longer works. As digital wallets connect to banks, FinTechs and telcos via APIs, risk is shared and interconnected. A single weakness can ripple across the entire value chain. In that world, real-time insight isn’t about differentiation; it’s the foundation that enables innovation to scale safely.

Inclusion and innovation with guardrails

Mobile money platforms and interoperable wallet ecosystems are reshaping how individuals and small businesses transact, driving a shift toward more accessible and instant digital payments. Across Africa, digital wallets and account-to-account (A2A) payments are preferred over cards for everyday transactions, with surveys showing that more than 80% of respondents use digital money transfers or instant payment services.

Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) is increasingly emerging as part of the broader digital finance expansion, particularly among younger, digitally active consumers who use it to manage larger purchases and cash flow challenges. According to TransUnion’s Consumer Pulse Study, a significant share of Gen Z and Millennial consumers in South Africa reported using BNPL services. TransUnion Africa’s analysis of BNPL adoption also emphasises that sustainable growth will depend on stronger guardrails, including affordability checks, fraud controls and transparent data visibility. These measures help balance innovation with consumer protection and reinforce the need for smarter compliance frameworks that integrate real-time risk analytics across the customer lifecycle.

We don’t see compliance as a brake on innovation. The real question is whether compliance is built into leadership thinking and product design from day one or only introduced at the last minute. Institutions that view compliance as an enabler of sustainable growth, rather than a barrier, are the ones that will scale safely.

The narrowing decision window

Instant payments reduce settlement times from days to seconds, dramatically shrinking the window available to detect suspicious behaviour. In an era of AI-enabled fraud, including deepfakes and automated attack patterns, traditional static rule-based systems are no longer sufficient.

Speed is transforming financial services for the better. It lowers costs, increases access and supports financial inclusion, especially in a continent as young and digitally engaged as Africa. But speed without intelligence becomes a liability. Institutions must ingest richer data, apply predictive analytics and embed automation to make confident decisions in real time.

This shift is driving a new compliance paradigm, one that integrates identity verification, AML monitoring, sanctions and PEP screening, behavioural analytics and automated case management into a unified, real-time risk framework.

The future isn’t about adding more manual checks. It’s about orchestrating identity, behavioural and transactional data into a unified, real-time view of risk. That’s how we protect customers without compromising experience.

Designing Africa’s next chapter, smarter

Africa has an opportunity few regions possess: the chance to design payment infrastructure for the digital age rather than retrofit legacy systems. It will require deeper collaboration between regulators, banks, FinTechs, trusted data providers and RegTech platforms to embed intelligence directly into payment ecosystems rather than layering it on afterwards, because the lesson from other markets is clear - speed without embedded intelligence creates systemic risk.

We are at an inflection point, if we build with intelligence at the core, combining real-time data, automation and a proactive compliance culture, Africa can lead in creating payment systems that are not only fast and inclusive, but resilient.