Regional industry leaders are calling for urgent reforms that would address high cost of transaction affecting businesses.
Speakers at a forum organised by global financial services form Ebury said currency fragmentation, broken payment rails, and the systemic barriers are holding back regional commerce.
The forum noted the long process especially enterprises face while trading in local currencies highlighting structural dysfunction facing traders, manufacturers, and logistics operators across East Africa.
“Moving products across East Africa is where the nightmare begins,” said Bidco Group Chairman Vimal Shah said.
“We only do dollars. The transaction is settled in New York.”
The impact on smaller traders is even more acute, from the mama mboga sourcing goods across the border to the hardware dealer importing from Uganda, every unnecessary step in the payment chain means more cost, more friction, and less profit.
Standard Chartered Bank Managing Director and Head of Transaction Banking Makabelo Malumane acknowledged the scale of the dollar dependency problem directly.
“How do we get from the dollar fix in every transaction?”
She pointed to Kenya’s newly enacted Virtual Asset Service Providers Act, 2025, as a potential mechanism to unlock faster and more efficient payment rails, signalling that regulatory modernisation may finally be catching up with the needs of traders on the ground.
According to Kennedy Osano, Senior Key Accounts Director for Africa at Ebury, the biggest structural gaps facing cross-border payment are market and currency fragmentation.
“There is a regulatory and compliance misalignment, with each country’s central bank operating under its own mandate, creating a patchwork of conflicting rules that makes every cross-border transaction more complicated and costly than it needs to be,” said Osano.
The forum brought together senior leaders from manufacturing, banking, asset management, and trade facilitation.
