Absa has entered Africa’s cross-border payments race with the launch of Absa Global Pay, a digital remittance service built in partnership with Singapore-based fintech Thunes, targeting lower fees and faster settlement across 18 countries. The move positions the bank directly against a growing field of competitors — from established players such as MoneyGram and WorldRemit to African-born fintechs including Mukuru, Nala and Chipper Cash — all competing for a share of a market that is expanding at pace.
The scale of the opportunity is considerable. Africa’s cross-border payments market is currently valued at $329 billion and is projected to surpass $1 trillion by 2035, growing at a compound annual rate of 12%. Formal remittance inflows to the continent have maintained a growth rate of between 10% and 15% annually over the past five years, and in 2024 total remittance flows into Africa crossed $96 billion — roughly double the level of overseas development assistance and broadly in line with foreign direct investment inflows for that year.
The cost of sending money remains a significant structural problem and a commercial opportunity. As noted by ISS African Futures, the average cost of sending money to Africa through mobile applications stood at approximately 5% in 2023 — far above the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal target of 3% by 2030. Sending to Southern Africa specifically cost 8.9% on average in the first quarter of 2025. Traditional bank transfers, at 7% or more, remain the most expensive channel, while mobile money platforms have demonstrated that fees of between 1.5% and 3% are commercially viable at scale. It is this cost gap that Absa and Thunes are targeting.
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The partnership gives Absa access to Thunes’ payments infrastructure, which connects to over 22 billion mobile wallets, bank accounts and cards across 130 countries in 80 currencies, including stablecoins. Thunes counts Uber, Airbnb, Visa, Mastercard, M-Pesa, WeChat Pay and WorldRemit among the companies plugged into its network, and already has a similar arrangement with MTN’s mobile money unit in Nigeria. For Absa — a bank with operations across 16 African countries and close to 13 million customers, the majority of them in South Africa — the deal provides a ready-built settlement network without the cost of building bilateral corridor agreements from scratch.
The service will initially cover six priority corridors: the United Kingdom, Kenya, India, Malawi, Pakistan and Zimbabwe, before expanding to a total of 18 countries. Customers will be able to initiate transfers directly from the Absa banking app or online banking platform, with payout options including bank accounts, mobile wallets and approved cash collection points. South Africa’s large migrant population — drawn predominantly from neighbouring countries including Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Malawi — makes the inward-remittance corridors into those markets particularly commercially relevant.
Absa is not the only South African retail bank moving in this direction. FNB and Capitec have both launched or partnered on cross-border payment products in recent years, reflecting a broader recognition that remittances, long dominated by specialist operators, represent a retention and acquisition opportunity for banks with established customer bases.
Absa’s managing executive for transactional banking and services, Nick Nkosi, has described remittances as an area of significant untapped value — with the bank’s own research pointing to material opportunity in providing a simpler, faster and more cost-competitive service than those currently available to its customers. Absa’s full-year 2025 results, due to be released on 10 March 2026, are expected to provide further context on the bank’s transactional banking growth ambitions.