Kenya, Nigeria Lead Africa’s Cross-Border Payments Interoperability Rankings, Thunes Says
Four African countries, including Kenya and Nigeria, feature in the global Top 50 for cross-border payments interoperability, according to a ranking published on June 2, 2026, by Singapore-based cross-border payments company Thunes. The ranking covers more than 130 countries and over 90 currencies.
The ranking, titled The Thunes Cross-Border Payments Interoperability Index, assesses the ease of conducting cross-border transactions across the world’s 50 best-performing markets in this area. Thunes based the index on a survey of 6,600 respondents, including consumers and businesses, across 10 major markets: China, the United States, the United Kingdom, India, Nigeria, the Philippines, Brazil, Germany, South Africa and Saudi Arabia.
The company also incorporated indicators from multiple sources, including the World Bank’s Global Findex 2025 database and World Bank remittance cost data. The index groups these indicators into five dimensions. These dimensions include economic health, digital infrastructure, financial inclusion, cross-border connectivity and market dynamics.
The economic health dimension measures factors such as GDP, trade openness and quality of life. The digital infrastructure dimension measures internet penetration and the share of adults who have made or received a digital payment during the previous three months.
The financial inclusion dimension measures wealth inequality, access to bank branches and the share of adults holding a formal financial account or mobile money account. The cross-border connectivity dimension measures remittance costs, the share of transactions processed through instant payment systems and the overall value of the cross-border payments market.
The market dynamics dimension evaluates regulatory initiatives that support money transfer markets, including open banking measures and cryptocurrency regulations, as well as projected growth in cross-border payments activity. The index assigns each country a score ranging from 0, indicating very low interoperability, to 10, indicating optimal interoperability.
