BCEAO Makes PI-SPI Interoperability Mandatory and Reprices Across WAEMU
West Africa's regional central bank BCEAO has made its PI-SPI interbank payment platform mandatory and revised its pricing structure, with the changes taking immediate effect across all eight WAEMU member markets. The move follows BCEAO's 30 September deadline that brought Wave and 175 licensed participants into the system, and now resets the commercial terms for the entire $267 billion West African payments market.
PI-SPI: 175 plugged in, but only 24 are building anything
Mandatory connection is not the same as a thriving platform.
Of the 175 institutions now legally required to route through PI-SPI — BCEAO's regional payment system linking all eight West African UEMOA countries — only 24 have qualified for the Business API layer: the tier that lets you actually build products on top of the rails, not just pass money through them.
That gap is the real story behind the new pricing. Free transfers under 8,000 CFA francs (covering three-quarters of all mobile money transactions) removes the fee argument for staying out. But the article notes that same free tier is precisely what operators used to charge for — so the mandate compresses the commercial case for building new products just as BCEAO, for the first time in official language, says it wants new products built.
Who does that leave holding the pick? Mostly Ecobank — the one institution certified across all eight countries at the API tier — while everyone else watches from the participant layer.