For decades, opening a basic checking account in the CEMAC region — Cameroon, Gabon, Chad, the Central African Republic, the Republic of Congo, and Equatorial Guinea — required formal employment records, clean utility bills, a minimum deposit, and a physical journey to a branch that, for most rural residents, was hours away on neglected roads. By treating financial services as a privilege for state elites and foreign corporations, traditional banks locked over 80% of the regional population out of the formal economy. Then came the mobile phone, and within a decade, the entire architecture changed.
The BEAC's 2024 Annual Report on Payment Services, published in early 2026, confirms what anyone operating in the region already knows on the ground: mobile money now accounts for 94.34% of all financial transactions in the CEMAC zone by volume. That is not a market share. It is a structural displacement. Across the six member states, 51.27 million mobile money accounts were registered at end-2024, up 28% from 40 million the year before. Cameroon alone holds 62% of those accounts — nearly 25 million active mobile wallets against roughly 2 million traditional bank accounts. The annual volume of transactions processed via mobile networks has long since dwarfed what moves through the traditional banking system at the retail level.
How the telcos won
The defeat of traditional banking in the region was, at its core, a failure of institutional imagination. Commercial banks chose not to invest in rural expansion, treating the low-income majority as a credit risk with negligible profit margins. MTN and Orange approached the same market from the opposite direction. They understood that a farmer in northern Cameroon or a trader in eastern CAR might never see a bank branch — but almost certainly owned a basic handset. Rather than building expensive physical infrastructure, they co-opted the existing landscape: thousands of small street kiosks originally built to sell SIM cards became informal cash-in/cash-out points. Within a few years, the telcos had deployed a retail financial footprint that no traditional bank could afford to match.
The utility of mobile wallets expanded rapidly beyond personal transfers. In Cameroon, the Ministry of Finance integrated mobile wallets directly into the state apparatus — MoMo became the primary channel for paying university tuition, school fees, and municipal utility bills. In transit hubs and informal marketplaces across N'Djamena and Bangui, transactions for agricultural produce, fuel, and construction materials are now settled instantly via phone screen. Diaspora remittances from Europe and North America have migrated away from traditional wire services to direct-to-wallet transfers, injecting liquidity into rural communities without passing through the formal banking system.
When the regulators caught up
As billions of CFA francs migrated from cash into digital ledgers, regional regulators were forced to respond. GIMAC — the Central African Interbank Electronic Payments Group — launched the GIMACPAY platform in 2020 to create full interoperability across the CEMAC zone. By end-2023, the platform had processed over 601.7 billion CFA francs (~USD 1,5 bln) across 12 million transactions, a 50% increase in value from the previous year. In April 2026, GIMAC signed a memorandum of understanding with Visa to expand international gateways and integrate GIMACPAY into e-commerce and government payment systems. The goal: 60% financial inclusion across the region by 2029. BEAC's alignment with the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) takes the integration further, opening the door for instant local-currency transfers between CEMAC countries and neighboring giants like Nigeria — without converting funds through dollars or euros. For small traders operating across the Cameroon-Nigeria border, this is not a technical detail. It is the difference between paying a 3-5% conversion premium on every transaction and paying nothing.
The consolidation of digital wealth has, predictably, attracted fiscal attention. Governments across the region have introduced transaction taxes on mobile payments to plug budget deficits, and the BEAC's 2024 report is explicit about the risk: the active account rate actually fell from 42.67% to 35.29% even as total account numbers rose, a sign that excessive taxation is pushing some users back toward cash. The tension between revenue mobilization and the integrity of a payment system that now underpins the regional economy is, as BEAC frames it, "a live regulatory and policy risk."
The banks strike back — too late to win
Faced with systemic marginalization, traditional banks have abandoned their resistance and are scrambling to integrate the fintech model they spent a decade ignoring. The dominant trend is bank-telecom partnerships built around instant micro-credit. By analyzing users' daily transaction patterns — airtime consumption, payment frequency, merchant activity — telcos generate real-time credit scores and disburse micro-loans directly through handset menus, with no collateral or paperwork required. BEAC data recorded 897,021 such mobile credits in 2024, with an average ticket of 16,114 CFA francs (roughly $26) and total disbursements of 14.45 billion CFA francs (~$25,2 million).
Commercial banking in Central Africa will not disappear. It remains the essential mechanism for corporate financing, sovereign debt management, and the heavy capital needs of the extractive sector. But its claim over the everyday financial lives of ordinary residents is gone — and it is not coming back. The economic identity of Central Africa is no longer determined by the ledger books of colonial-era banks, but by the digital wallets carried in the pockets of its population.
