On July 20, 2026, the governors of the Central Bank of Egypt and the Central Bank of Eswatini met in Cairo to discuss expanding banking cooperation, Egypt's experience with the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), and the Pan-African Gold Bank initiative already underway with African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank, Cairo, Egypt).
PAPSS enables instant cross-border payments in local currencies through three core processes: instant payment, pre-funding and net settlement. Instant payments eliminate the need to convert into hard currencies and route funds outside Africa, while performing compliance, legal and sanctions checks in real time. This will save African nations an estimated $5 billion annually in Western bank transaction fees.
PAPSS, operated by Afreximbank together with the African Union and the AfCFTA Secretariat, had by then linked banks across a growing network. The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), which entered into force on May 30, 2019, and by mid-2026 had been ratified by 49 of 54 signatory states, is the continent-wide free-trade area covering a market of more than 1.4 billion people; PAPSS was developed specifically to support payments and settlement under it.
The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is the flagship project of the African Union's Agenda 2063. It creates a single market of more than 1.4 billion people across the 55 AU member states by liberalizing trade in goods and services, investment, intellectual property, competition, digital trade, and women and youth participation.
In July 2026 the Bank of Central African States joined PAPSS, bringing in the six CEMAC CFA-franc countries and raising the total to 28 nations served by more than 190 commercial banks and fintechs through 16 switches. Customer payments move entirely in local currencies: a payer instructs a bank, PAPSS performs real-time validation, compliance, and sanctions checks, and the beneficiary’s bank credits the recipient, typically in about seven seconds against a 120-second design maximum.
Separately, on December 29–30, 2025, the Central Bank of Egypt and Afreximbank signed a memorandum of understanding to establish a pan-African gold-bank program intended to formalize gold value chains, strengthen central-bank reserves, and reduce reliance on foreign refining and trading hubs.Because the credits are irrevocable, direct participants pre-fund clearing accounts through their national Real-Time Gross Settlement Systems (RTGS) while indirect participants obtain liquidity through sponsorship. At 11:00 UTC each day, PAPSS calculates the multilateral net position of every participating central bank, settles the local-currency leg through the central banks' RTGS systems, and sends any residual imbalance as a hard-currency instruction to Afreximbank, which acts as settlement agent. The residual step still uses dollars or other convertible currencies, yet the front end largely bypasses external correspondent chains and sharply reduces the volume of hard-currency settlement required.
A feasibility study for an internationally accredited gold refinery, secure vaulting, and related financial services—potentially located in an Egyptian free-trade zone—was commissioned with McKinsey; by mid-2026 Afreximbank had signaled a $50–100 million commitment toward the refinery, with construction targeted for the end of 2026 and operations in 2027–28. The project remains at the planning stage.
From 2012–2022, industrial/semi-industrial gold mining operated in 26+ African countries, with output rising in most. Production nearly doubled in Mali and Burkina Faso and increased fivefold in Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast), while declining elsewhere—most notably in South Africa (180 tons in 2011 to 84 tons in 2022). In 2022, Ghana led with 95.8 tons, followed by South Africa (84), Mali (66.2), and Burkina Faso (57.7).
Parallel developments are linking Africa more closely to Chinese and Hong Kong infrastructure. Afreximbank became a direct participant of China's Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS) and Standard Bank the first African commercial bank to join the system; in June 2026, Standard Bank and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) were authorized as the Renminbi Clearing Bank of Africa, covering 19 countries.
Hong Kong’s Christopher Hui advanced gold-market memoranda with Laos and exploratory discussions with Ghana, while the Hong Kong Gold Exchange partnered with Alibaba-backed AGTech on a digital trading and clearing platform. Chinese gold imports reached roughly 163 tons in May and 173 tonnes in June 2026, against official People's Bank of China (PBOC) purchases of about 10 and 15 tonnes respectively; the difference is absorbed by commercial banks and private demand.
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