If you look at the sheer volume of transactions moving from cash to digital across the continent, it is clear that the “infrastructure phase” of African fintech is still very much in overdrive. Mastercard confirmed this trajectory today, reporting that it expanded its acceptance network across Africa by a massive 45 per cent in 2025 alone.
For a company of that size, moving the needle by nearly half in a single year is significant. It suggests that the race to capture Africa’s projected $1.5 trillion digital payments market (by 2030) is accelerating faster than anticipated.
But the story here isn’t just about more point-of-sale (POS) terminals in shopping malls. It is about a strategic pivot toward unbanked sectors, aggressive hiring, and a suite of “bridge” technologies designed to pull offline SMEs onto the grid.
The Ground Game: New HQs and Local Hires
Mastercard has spent the last 24 months physically entrenching itself in key markets. The company opened new offices in Ghana, Uganda, and Mauritius, with more markets slated for 2026.
Crucially, they aren’t just opening satellite sales offices; they are building engineering and product density. The company grew its employee base across the continent by nearly 20 per cent this year. The logic is straightforward: you cannot build products for Lagos or Nairobi from a boardroom in New York. This localized workforce is focused on co-creating solutions—specifically tokenization upgrades, digital identity capabilities, and virtual card enhancements—that solve specific African friction points, such as trust and cross-border payment failures.
The SME Strategy: Beyond the Plastic Card
Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are the economic backbone of the continent, yet they remain the hardest segment to digitize. Mastercard’s 2025 strategy involved deploying a mix of low-hardware and no-hardware solutions to lower the barrier to entry.
The company rolled out 15 new SME-focused programs in the last 18 months, leaning heavily on five specific technologies:
- Tap on Phone: Turning any NFC-enabled Android phone into a payment terminal, removing the need for expensive hardware.
- Mastercard Payment Gateway System (MPGS): The backend rails for e-commerce.
- QR Payment Capabilities: Both “Pay by Link” (for remote payments) and “QR on Card.”
- Business Payment Control: Tools allowing businesses to issue virtual cards to employees or suppliers with spending limits.
The adoption numbers for these tools are starting to stack up across the continent.
West Africa In Nigeria, the gig economy is the primary target. Mastercard partnered with UBA and WEMA Bank to deploy “QR-on-Card” solutions. This tech essentially prints a QR code directly on a bank card or ID, allowing 1.8 million SMEs and gig workers to accept payments by having customers scan their card—no POS machine required. Meanwhile, a partnership with Zenith Bank is issuing USD-denominated cards to over 50,000 SMEs, a critical tool for businesses importing goods who are often hamstrung by forex volatility.
North Africa In Morocco, the approach was government-led. Mastercard co-developed the country’s first Digital Marketplace alongside the Ministry of Handicrafts, BCP, and Paysky. The platform has onboarded 2.3 million artisans, giving them a direct digital channel to sell their goods, bypassing traditional middlemen.
East Africa In our own backyard (Kenya, Tanzania, and Mauritius), Mastercard cemented collaborations with KCB, Family Bank, NMB, and AfrAsia. These partnerships have reportedly equipped over 200,000 SMEs with the digital toolkits mentioned above.
Shehryar Ali, the SVP for East Africa, noted that the region is “leading the world in digital financial inclusion,” specifically citing the scaling of cross-border solutions and virtual cards this year.
Solving the “Last Mile”: The Ag-Tech Push
Perhaps the most ambitious part of Mastercard’s 2025 roadmap is the Community Pass initiative. This is a digital platform designed for remote and rural communities where internet connectivity is intermittent or non-existent. The goal is to create a digital ID and transaction profile for users who have never had a bank account.
The target is 15 million users within five years. Currently, they have reached 1.2 million smallholder farmers in Uganda.
In Kenya, this feeds into the MADE Alliance (Mobilizing Access to the Digital Economy). Since May 2024, this alliance has:
- digitized the profiles of over 80,000 farmers via “Farm Pass,” allowing them to build a credit history based on their produce.
- Provided digital training and internet access to 10,000+ farmers via 13 cooperatives.
- Built capacity for 250,000 farmers through local partners.
This is the “long game.” By digitizing farmers, Mastercard is effectively creating a new customer base for financial institutions that previously viewed agriculture as too high-risk.
The Outlook: AI and the 2030 Horizon
Looking forward, Mastercard is betting that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be the next friction-remover. The company projects the African AI market will hit $16.5 billion by 2030.
The buzzword they are using is “agentic commerce”—essentially, AI agents that can negotiate and execute transactions on behalf of users. While that technology is still nascent, the infrastructure being laid down now—tokenization, digital IDs, and acceptance networks—is the prerequisite for that future.
As Mark Elliott, Division President for Africa, put it, 2025 was a “defining year.” The focus has shifted from simple access to building a sophisticated, interconnected financial system. If 2025 was about laying the rails, 2026 will likely be about the speed of the trains running on them.
