West Africa’s Payment Network Faces Rocky Launch

The Banque Centrale des États de l’Afrique de l’Ouest (BCEAO) ordered that all interoperable electronic-money transfers in the bloc route through PI-SPI. The scheme connects 175 institutions and more than 38 million people, and is designed to break the grip of closed-loop telecom and fintech wallets.

Aliases That Don’t Travel, Transfers That Don’t Land

The biggest complaint is the alias system. Users must create an alias to send money across institutions, and many in Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire say the system fails to recognize credentials they already hold. Some also report that creating an alias on one platform blocks access on another. In a market used to sending money with a phone number, the change turns a two-click payment into a hunt for platform-specific codes.

The problems go beyond the interface. Users moving money from Orange Money to Wave reported that Orange Money debited the sender while Wave never credited the recipient. Some were reimbursed manually, but only after long delays. Similar failures showed up in bank-to-wallet transfers, and customer service teams reportedly pointed at each other, with telecom operators blaming fintechs and the reverse. Ecobank Senegal announced the transition on social media, only for users to find features missing in its app.

A Fee Cap With a Gap in It

The BCEAO capped transfer fees: free below 8,000 CFA francs (about $13) and 0.8 percent above that. The cap does not cover cash-out charges, and operators noticed. Wave, which dominates mobile money in Senegal, introduced a 1 percent fee on cash withdrawals. Users now face the capped transfer fee plus the withdrawal charge. One user reported paying 0.94 percent on a UBA transfer once fees and taxes were combined.

Wave’s rollout timing has added to the anger. The company, Francophone Africa’s first tech unicorn, connected to PI-SPI on September 30, the regulatory deadline. The public-facing app update only began rolling out in early November, and by November 1 only a fraction of users had it. Some users accuse Wave of deliberate sabotage, though no evidence of that has been presented.

The sharpest risk for the BCEAO is sentiment. Social media is full of users threatening to go back to cash, which would undercut the financial inclusion goals behind the project. The 8,000 CFA threshold covers about 75 percent of transactions, so most everyday payments stay free, but merchants and anyone sending larger sums face higher costs and more complexity.

Hashlytics Take

Launch glitches get patched. The fee gap is different, because it is a design choice with an incentive attached. Capping transfers while leaving cash-out untouched tells operators exactly where to recover the revenue, and Wave did the obvious thing. The alias friction pushes the same way: when sending across platforms is harder than staying inside one, people keep multiple wallets, which is the closed-loop behavior PI-SPI was built to end. If the BCEAO wants interoperability to stick, regulating withdrawal fees is probably a bigger test than fixing the app.