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The Banque des États de l’Afrique Centrale (“BEAC”) has published its 2024 Report on Payment Services in the CEMAC zone.
The headline figures are striking: 502 Payment Service Providers accounting for 3.92 billion transactions, 182,962 billion CFA francs in aggregate value, 56.47 million accounts, and year-on-year growth of +5.76% in volume and +6.38% in value.
However, for practitioners advising financial institutions, payment service providers, or investors active in the sub-region, the more consequential material lies beneath those figures.
Mobile Money as the payment system and not a component of it
The instrument-level data leaves no interpretive ambiguity. Mobile money accounts for 94.34% of all transactions by volume (3,74 billion transactions). Card payments represent 2.93%. Classic wire transfers, 1.44%.
Everything else, from cheques, cash withdrawals, commercial paper, and fund transmission, operates at the margin by volume, though the value distribution is more balanced, with classic wire transfers representing 34.33% of aggregate value and cash withdrawals at the counter 27.33%.
The practical implication for legal and compliance work is significant. Any regulatory analysis of the CEMAC payment ecosystem that does not treat mobile money as the primary infrastructure, but rather as a complementary channel, misframes the risk, the compliance exposure, and the opportunity.
The account growth story requires careful unpacking
The report records 51.27 million mobile money accounts at end-2024, up 28.09% from 40 million the prior year.
Nine million of those new accounts are attributed principally to the roll-out of banking applications enabling bank clients to open a mobile payment account alongside their traditional account and, critically, to the regulatory decoupling of payment accounts from specific telecoms operators, which now allows a single phone number to be associated with accounts held at multiple establishments.
BEAC is explicit on the consequence: the account count does not map reliably to the number of financially included individuals. The active account rate fell from 42.67% to 35.29%, a decline of 17.30%, precisely as total account numbers rose.
This is a data quality and methodology problem with direct implications for any financial inclusion assessment, market sizing exercise, or regulatory impact analysis conducted in the zone.
Practitioners and investors who read bancarisation rates from headline account figures without adjusting for multi-account holding will materially overstate penetration.
The taxation question is now a structural variable
The report identifies the imposition of taxes on scriptural payment services in several CEMAC member states as a factor slowing growth relative to prior years.
BEAC describes having conducted a series of consultations with states on mobile payment taxation, explicitly framing its advisory role as ensuring that fiscal policy supports revenue mobilisation without impairing the payment ecosystem.
This tension between the state revenue imperatives and the integrity of a payment infrastructure that BEAC’s own data confirms is now the backbone of the regional financial system, is a live regulatory and policy risk.
For market participants, it represents both a compliance variable and a transaction cost that must be modelled in product pricing, business case construction, and market entry analysis.
AI-driven scoring algorithms for Mobile credits: material scale, early stage
The report records 897,021 mobile credits extended in 2024, with an aggregate disbursement of 14.45 billion CFA francs and an average ticket of 16,114 CFA francs.
The model rests on partnerships between licensed credit institutions, carrying the credit risk and prudential obligations, and payment establishments providing the distribution infrastructure and client base, with AI-driven scoring algorithms enabling automated underwriting at the micro-ticket level.
The numbers are still modest relative to the broader transaction base, but the structural architecture is significant.
The model operates at the intersection of banking law, payment services regulation, and data protection frameworks, in a jurisdiction where the regulatory perimeter for each is still consolidating.
The Central African Banking Commission (COBAC)’s adoption in December 2024 of Regulation R-2024/01 on IT risk management in supervised institutions adds a further layer of operational compliance obligation for participants in this space.
Cameroon’s structural dominance and what it means regionally
Cameroon concentrated 65.10% of transaction volume and 56.95% of aggregate value in 2024. Congo ranked second by volume (22.76%), while Gabon ranked second by value (17.49%).
The remaining three member states, the Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, and Chad, collectively accounted for less than 2% of transaction volume.
This concentration is not new, but its persistence shapes every aspect of regional payment infrastructure planning: where interoperability investments generate returns, where regulatory harmonisation efforts face asymmetric incentive structures, and where BEAC’s own recommendations on reducing inter-state disparities must contend with underlying economic and infrastructure realities.
The regulatory architecture is in active development
Several developments in 2024 warrant attention.
- BEAC issued Instruction N°001/GR/2024 of 22 January 2024 on technical standards for electronic payment instruments, covering authentication modalities, incident management, platform security, and data archiving.
- CORENOFI commenced work on ISO 20022 adoption, a migration with significant operational implications for all participants in the SYSTAC interbank compensation system.
- BEAC also delivered nine prior authorisations and two prior notifications under Regulation N°04/18/CEMAC/UMAC/COBAC governing new service offerings by payment establishments.
The direction of travel is clear: the regulatory perimeter is expanding, technical standards are tightening, and the compliance burden on payment service providers is increasing commensurately.
Further reading: CEMAC Extractive Sector: Evolving Obligations on Forex Repatriation & Site Restoration Funds.
Conclusion
The 2024 BEAC report documents a payment system in structural transition, one where mobile money has moved from instrument to infrastructure, where the account-level data requires methodological qualification before it can support financial inclusion analysis, and where the regulatory, fiscal, and technical environment is becoming materially more complex.
For institutions operating in or entering the CEMAC market, the analytical starting point is not the headline growth figure. It is the gap between what the numbers appear to say and what they actually measure.
You can download the full report below;
DISCLAIMER
This article is intended for general information purposes and does not constitute legal. Specific situations should be assessed in light of the applicable provisions and the particular facts involved.
