Interoperability Dream Becomes Fraud Paradise as Cross-Border Payments Outrun Traceability

DAKAR, Senegal — The long-sought dream of seamless cross-border payments across Africa has inadvertently opened a new front for financial crime, as mandatory interoperability between formerly closed mobile-money and banking systems enables fraudsters to launder illicit funds across multiple jurisdictions in seconds. On September 30, 2025, the Central Bank of West African States (BCEAO) officially launched the Interoperable Instant Payment System Platform (PI-SPI), allowing an Orange Money customer in Senegal to send money in real time to a bank account in Mali or a Moov Money wallet in Ivory Coast without friction or delay. While hailed as a breakthrough for financial inclusion and regional integration, the system has also become a powerful enabler for fraud.

The instantaneity of flows is precisely what makes them attractive to malicious actors. "SIM swap allows emptying a mobile wallet before any possible freeze, with funds leaving the original ecosystem instantly to another network," writes Basilie Nzame, a financial control expert. Fraudsters now use "mule accounts" to fragment and launder illicit flows, crossing in a few seconds from a wallet in Ivory Coast to a microfinance account in Benin and then to a bank in Senegal, blurring all traceability. This "fraud-as-a-service" model industrializes attacks through social engineering scripts, compromised databases, and pre-configured laundering infrastructures that allow the recycling of illicit funds between multiple countries without leaving traces.

The security gap is becoming particularly dangerous in real-time payment environments. Instant payment systems dramatically reduce the time available for manual reviews or delayed intervention, yet many organisations still treat onboarding, fraud prevention, transaction monitoring, and identity verification as separate functions instead of part of one connected trust infrastructure. As one RegTech Africa Conference participant noted, many financial systems were built for a much slower era of finance, leaving them ill-equipped to handle the speed of modern crime.

Interoperability has redrawn the perimeter of prudential obligations in ways regulators have not yet fully addressed. Connecting banks subject to Basel requirements, fintechs in the process of approval, and microfinance institutions with heterogeneous regulatory maturities on a common platform creates a chain of shared responsibility whose legal contours remain insufficiently defined. Critical questions remain unresolved: Who is responsible for KYC in a multi-actor transaction? Who files a suspicious activity report when a suspicious flow crosses three different types of institutions?

Experts are now calling for urgent action before the vulnerabilities are fully exploited. Recommended measures include mapping customer knowledge responsibilities by flow segment and contractualizing them with partners, recalibrating detection scenarios to cover multi-entity behaviors, and adopting a conservative declarative posture. "In the absence of a clear regulator position, declaring rather than waiting for a suspicious activity report sent in error does not generate sanctions," Nzame advises. For actors who delay, the consequences can be severe: sanctions from supervisory authorities, loss of approval, exclusion from the common infrastructure, or disruption of international banking correspondence relationships.

The fundamental challenge, experts warn, is that financial inclusion will only fulfill its promises if control mechanisms progress at the same pace as innovation. This requires shared governance among interconnected actors, real-time behavioral detection, contractual allocation of responsibilities for customer knowledge and combating money laundering, as well as harmonized declarative capacity on a regional scale. "The question is no longer whether to recognize it, but to act," the analysis concludes.