Payments in Sub-Saharan Africa

Payments in SSA is largely influenced by the themes across the region: low trust, low security, low infrastructure.

Cash is king

Because of lower banked populations, lower access to digital devices + added costs of non-cash payments, and lower trust societies, cash continues to be the dominant form of payments in SSA, across all markets.
Cash comes with a security downside, so in markets like Nigeria where theft is a top-of-mind concern, there's been larger appetite to switch to digital payments.

SSA is the last holdout emerging region where cash on delivery still dominates online sales, given consumers only want to part with their money when they know the good is in hand, having low trust a company will honor a return request
Low trust means you're only buying/selling from people within your inner network, with trusted references or opportunities for recourse through your social network. This not only hinders ecommerce from trusted brands but also hinders much of the important onlineSMB economic growth you see in other regions; spinning up an Instagram fashion business is made complex because payment creates a risk on both sides (my customer won't pay me until they receive the goods; or they pay me and then I don't deliver or give the user what they expect).
It also means trusting new financial service offerings is inherently difficult. Consumers want to see a physical manifestation of a business to trust it isn't a scam (one of the reasons why digital ads are pretty ineffective; a physical billboard pays off way more) and not having a physical branch where consumers can seek help

In these markets, traditional banks were both able to gain sufficient traction to satisfy customers looking for banking services (kind of) as well as had the power to squelch competition (most importantly).
So telco-based digital banking and payments has struggled to find it's footing in these markets. One key lever some upstarts (eg OPay) used was being more generous with providing unsecured consumer loans, claiming they could understand credit worthiness better or in a more economic way than traditional banks which allowed for this opportunity.