🇨🇲 Payments in the CEMAC zone

Six states, one currency, and a misleading namesake

The Central African Economic and Monetary Community brings six states together around a single currency, the Central African CFA franc, whose ISO 4217 code is XAF. Cameroon, the Central African Republic, the Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, and Chad share one central bank, the Bank of Central African States (BEAC), based in Yaoundé. They also share one banking supervisor, the Central African Banking Commission (COBAC), headquartered in Libreville. Equatorial Guinea has Spanish as an official language, unlike the other five states in the zone. Two common institutions coexist with six national administrations, which keep control of taxation, licensing regimes, and fee schedules. A regional rollout runs into this division of powers before it hits any technical issue. Connecting to the infrastructure is done once for the whole zone, while licensing, tax, and pricing are handled state by state.

The Central African CFA franc is pegged to the euro at a fixed rate of EUR 1 = XAF 655.957. A fixed parity is an administered conversion rate that does not move with supply and demand on the foreign exchange market. France guarantees its convertibility under the franc zone’s monetary cooperation arrangements (BEAC; French Treasury, Direction générale du Trésor). The West African CFA franc has the same parity with the euro, but the two currencies are distinct, each issued by its own central bank. The December 21, 2019, reform, which abolished the operations account and removed France from the governing bodies, applied only to the West African Monetary Union. In the CEMAC zone, the monetary cooperation agreement with France remains in force, including the centralization of part of the foreign exchange reserves.

The term “CFA franc” covers two currencies. The XAF is used in the six CEMAC states, the XOF in the eight WAEMU states, and neither is legal tender in the other zone. A payment from Douala to Abidjan crosses two monetary zones, two central banks, and two sets of exchange control rules. It is processed as a cross-border transaction, even though the amount on the invoice keeps the same face value. A contract denominated in “FCFA” without an ISO code therefore does not specify its settlement currency. The ambiguity has no effect as long as both parties are in the same zone. It surfaces at the first cross-border settlement, when the bank must determine which of the two currencies discharges the debt.

The six states have different economic structures. Congo, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, and Chad rely on hydrocarbons for their export revenue. Cameroon has the broadest economic base and the largest population in the zone (World Bank, country economic updates). The BEAC’s foreign exchange reserves rest on concentrated export earnings, which led the central bank to tighten controls on outflows. The International Monetary Fund follows the issue in its Article IV reports. Article IV of the IMF’s Articles of Agreement provides for periodic consultations between the Fund and each of its member states. These outflow controls come into play when funds are transferred out of the zone. Local payment collection, by contrast, runs on the infrastructure described in the next section.

SYSTAC, SYGMA, and a central bank that runs its own rails

Interbank payments in the zone run on two systems operated by the BEAC and launched in 2007. Their legal framework is the community regulation on payment systems, instruments, and incidents, adopted in 2003 by the Ministerial Committee of the Central African Monetary Union (UMAC). SYSTAC, the Central African electronic clearing system, handles retail instruments, meaning high-volume, low-value payment methods. SYGMA, the automated large-value system, settles in central bank money. The exact reference of the regulation is available on the BEAC website. Several of the zone’s texts have been revised since adoption, so a contractual reference must cite a dated version.

SYSTAC carries checks, credit transfers, direct debit instructions, and card transactions exchanged between institutions. It runs in cycles, calculates multilateral net positions, then passes those balances to SYGMA. A multilateral net position is a participant’s single balance with all other participants, set at the end of the cycle. SYGMA settles transaction by transaction, on the accounts participants hold with the BEAC. Finality, the moment a payment becomes irrevocable, arises from this settlement in central bank money. Until then, the positions calculated in clearing remain provisional. A retail payment therefore passes through both systems, and its irrevocability depends on a settlement that occurs after the clearing cycle closes.

The BEAC combines four roles that other zones divide among several entities. It issues the currency, regulates payment methods, oversees the systems, and operates them itself. No commercial clearing house sits in between, and no private operator sells access to the rail. Access is requested from the central bank, on terms it sets, and requires a settlement account on its books. A nonbank provider therefore cannot join SYSTAC directly. It goes through a participating institution or through the regional switch described below.

• The participant, not the provider. A payment institution or an e-money issuer reaches SYSTAC and SYGMA through a participating bank, which holds the settlement account and is responsible for the exchange.
• Cycles, not real time. SYSTAC settles net at set times; promising a payee credit within seconds on this rail means promising something the infrastructure does not do.
• Checks have not disappeared. They are still exchanged in clearing, with their return periods and bounced items, while many markets have abandoned them.
• Payment incidents are centralized. The community regulation provides for reporting and centralizing them, which gives a bounced check regional consequences, not just consequences with one bank.
• The threshold between the two systems is a parameter. The BEAC sets the amount above which a transaction moves to gross settlement; check it with your bank, not in a market note.

The regional switch also settles in the central bank’s systems. Positions from interoperable exchanges between banks, mobile wallets, and microfinance institutions are fed into them, just like those from retail clearing. The visible layer of the payment varies widely from one use case to another, but the settlement layer stays the same. A common view places the mobile wallet outside the banking system. Yet interoperable exchanges settle on the accounts held at the BEAC, just like credit transfers and checks.

GIMACPAY: interoperability by mandate, and its blind spots

The Groupement interbancaire monétique de l’Afrique centrale (GIMAC), the region’s interbank electronic payments consortium, organizes interbank interoperability in the zone under the aegis of the BEAC. Interbank interoperability means that a customer of one institution can use a service provided by another. GIMAC’s platform, GIMACPAY, went live in 2020. It brings cards, e-money wallets, and transfers together on a single rail for all six states. Interoperability there comes from a regulatory decision: BEAC Instruction No. 001/GR/2018 imposed it on the zone’s market players, and the switch was built to implement it. A central bank decision thus replaced the bilateral negotiations that other African regions pursued for 10 years.

The list of connected participants says as much through its mix as through its total. Banks are the most numerous, yet e-money wallets carry nearly all the transactions. Aggregators are the second-largest group, reflecting extensive technical intermediation between merchants and the rail. An aggregator connects merchants to several issuers through a single interface. Two public treasuries are among the members, alongside the central bank itself. Connecting to the switch therefore puts a payment collector inside an infrastructure where the regulator is itself a participant, not on a marketplace run by a private operator.

Access to the CEMAC market comes through membership in GIMAC rather than through bank-by-bank agreements. The process has three steps: the applicant chooses a participation category, connects technically, then partners with a participant that handles settlement in the BEAC’s systems. A technical aggregator does not have the same status as a licensed institution, and the difference lies in which entity holds customer funds. Before you sign, COBAC’s register shows which of the two holds the license, information a commercial brand never discloses.

The interoperability mandate covers how transactions are routed, not how they are priced. Each issuer sets the price it charges for an outgoing transaction to a competitor. An off-net fee higher than the on-net fee discourages use of the route the switch makes technically available. The Central Bank of Kenya faced this situation and required on-net and off-net fees to be aligned after cross-network transfers opened in 2018. A collection fee schedule is therefore negotiated issuer by issuer, even in a market where interoperability is mandatory.

Mobile money: operators, agents, taxes, and Cameroon’s weight

Central Africa is the smallest mobile money market in Africa by flow value. Annual flows reached $806 billion in East Africa in 2025 and $498 billion in West Africa (GSMA, State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money 2026). Central Africa is an order of magnitude smaller, with around 20 live services. This size gap explains the BEAC’s approach. A bilateral interoperability agreement is negotiated issuer by issuer, and its negotiation cost is spread only over the volumes exchanged between the two signatories. A small market therefore does not attract such agreements. The regulator used an instruction to achieve the openness that other regions reached through commercial negotiation.

Mobile money offerings have to be described market by market, since the operators differ from one state to the next. In Cameroon, MTN MoMo and Orange Money dominate the market, ahead of local players that started in money transfers. Airtel Money operates in Gabon, Congo, and Chad, alongside MTN in Congo and Maroc Telecom’s subsidiaries under the Moov Africa brand in Gabon, Chad, and the Central African Republic. Equatorial Guinea remains the least documented of the six markets. Brands change at every border, while the regional switch is the same for all six states. A single technical integration therefore opens access to the whole zone, and commercial relationships are then built with each issuer separately.

The e-money issuance regime is the legal status of the entity that issues the units and holds the corresponding funds. In the original model, a telecom wallet relied on a partner bank, which alone handled issuance and the safeguarding of funds. The community payment services regulation created a dedicated status, applied for by the entity that actually holds customer funds. The license is granted by the national monetary authority on the binding opinion of COBAC, which leaves the substantive decision to the regional supervisor. Due diligence covers three points: which entity holds the license, where the funds are safeguarded, and how often e-money outstanding is reconciled with the funds on deposit. Safeguarding means holding customer funds in an account separate from the issuer’s own resources. The brand under which the service is sold reveals nothing about any of these three points.

Cameroon is the zone’s leading market. It is the most populous state and the largest economy (World Bank, country economic updates), and it hosts the headquarters of the main operators. Regional projects start there because of volume, regardless of the applicable regulatory regime. The country is also on the FATF list of jurisdictions under increased monitoring, as of February 13, 2026. The Financial Action Task Force is the intergovernmental body that sets international standards for combating money laundering and terrorist financing. The listing shows up in correspondent banking relationships: questionnaires get longer, onboarding takes more time, and existing accounts come under review.

The agent network is the set of physical locations where wallet holders deposit and withdraw cash. Its density determines how useful a bulk payment actually is. A wallet balance is useful to the recipient only once it is converted into cash, and that requires an accessible agent. Coverage varies from state to state. Gabon is highly urbanized, while Chad and the Central African Republic have populations spread over distances few networks cover. A disbursement program designed in Douala can therefore fail in Moundou because of gaps in the agent network, with no payment system at fault.

The real bottleneck: exchange control and moving money out of the zone

The zone’s exchange regime is set out in Regulation No. 02/18/CEMAC/UMAC/CM of December 21, 2018, on exchange control in CEMAC, which took effect on March 1, 2019. It replaced the previous regime and tightened controls on transactions with the rest of the world. The BEAC has implemented it through a series of instructions that contain the operational detail. Domestic payments in XAF fall outside its scope; they run on the infrastructure described above. The regulation governs transactions with the rest of the world, including the transfer of funds collected in the zone to a foreign account.

Bank domiciliation is the registration of a foreign trade contract with a resident bank, which then monitors its documentary and financial execution. An import or export contract above the threshold set by the regulation must be domiciled with an authorized intermediary, meaning a resident bank, before any transactions are carried out. The bank becomes responsible for the documentary follow-up of the file until financial settlement and clearance. Clearance closes the file once the supporting documents are gathered and financial settlement is confirmed. The threshold and the list of documents are set out in the regulation and the instructions in force on the contract date. Without prior domiciliation, the related transfer does not go out. The bank has no authority to execute it, however creditworthy the customer.

Repatriation of export proceeds is the obligation for a resident exporter to bring the foreign currency earned from its sales back into the zone within the period set by the regulation. The exporter must then sell that currency through its bank. Holding foreign currency accounts is restricted and requires central bank authorization. The extractive sector has been brought back under the common regime with transitional arrangements, an issue the International Monetary Fund follows in its Article IV reports. Taken together, these rules channel export earnings into the resident banking system and then to the central bank, which holds the reserves.

Transfers out of the zone are handled at two levels. The first is the bank, which executes the order on presentation of the required supporting documents and keeps its reporting to the central bank up to date. The second is the BEAC, whose prior authorization is required above certain amounts and for capital transactions. Thresholds, documents, and deadlines are set out in the implementing instructions, which have been revised several times since 2019. That is why no figures are given here. Standard practice is to have the authorized intermediary confirm in writing, case by case, which level the transaction falls under and the exact list of documents required.

These rules shape the legal structure of payment collection. A nonresident provider collecting payments in the zone needs a local anchor, either a resident entity or a licensed partner, to hold the banking relationship and the exchange control file. The choice of merchant of record then determines who bears the repatriation obligation, and under which contract. A setup that places the commercial contract outside the zone while collecting inside it creates a mismatch the local bank has no way to resolve. The structure must therefore be set at the design stage, since it depends on the commercial contract and the entity that signs it. Technical integration comes later and changes neither.

• Write XAF, never FCFA, in the contract, the fee schedule, and the accounting files, since the ISO code is the only unambiguous way to name the currency.
• Get the exchange control file reviewed before technical integration, with the applicable level, the list of documents, and the bank’s stated timeline confirmed in writing.
• Domicile the relevant contracts at signing, without waiting for the first payment, since domiciliation is a precondition for the transfer, not the other way around.
• Check the COBAC register for the entity that holds the license of each partner, since the brand reveals nothing about who holds the funds or which regime applies.
• Handle taxes state by state, starting from the current year’s finance act rather than a published comparison, since e-money levies change with every budget year.
• Separate two timing commitments in the contract, one for the local credit and one for the payout out of the zone, since they depend on different parties.
• Ask about a partner’s on-us traffic as much as its switched traffic, since the volumes GIMAC publishes cover only the interoperable share.