The money moved to our phones. Now what?

I grew up seeing money in Senegal move in cash. Envelopes at family events, a cousin traveling with money for someone in another city, long lines at transfer agencies at the end of the month. If you wanted to send 10,000 FCFA to someone, you paid a real fee and you lost a real afternoon.

Today it’s a few seconds on a phone. And the speed of that change still surprises me every time I go back home.

A big part of the story is Wave. It launched in Senegal in 2018 with a simple idea: send money for 1%, and deposit or withdraw for free. At the time, that was a big deal. Fees were much higher, and for a lot of people they were a reason to keep using cash. Wave’s pricing pushed the whole market to move. Orange Money cut some of its fees to 1% too. In 2021, Wave raised $200 million at a $1.7 billion valuation, and became the first unicorn in French-speaking Africa. By then it already had about half of Senegal’s mobile money accounts.

What I find beautiful is that it wasn’t a fancy technology. It was a cheaper price, a simple app, and agents on every corner. That’s it. The product respected people’s money, and people came.

But there was still a problem. Your money lived in one app. If you were on Wave and your friend was on Orange Money, it got complicated. Shops showed two or three QR codes on the counter. Some people carried two phones just to be safe.

Now that’s changing too. In September 2025, the BCEAO, the central bank of the eight UEMOA countries, launched PI-SPI, an instant payment platform that connects banks and mobile money providers. On October 2, 2026, they announced that from November 2 every e-money transfer between different providers has to go through it. Small transfers between people are free up to 8,000 FCFA a day, receiving is free, and from June 2027 the same rules apply across the eight countries. Sending money from Dakar to Abidjan should feel like sending it across the street.

When I look at all this together, I see the same pattern happening again. First the money went digital. Now the systems are starting to talk to each other. In other parts of the world, that second step is usually when a lot of new products show up, because builders don’t have to fight the infrastructure anymore. They can focus on what people actually need.

I think West Africa is right at that moment. The rails are finally being laid, and they’re being laid fast. Most of what will be built on top of them doesn’t exist yet.

As someone who designs and builds products, that’s the most exciting thing I’ve read in a long time. I don’t want to just watch this from far away.