Ecobank, a pan-African financial services group, has partnered with Nium, a global infrastructure for real-time cross border payment, to enable seamless cross-border payments in 35 African markets.

The partnership aims to revolutionise Africa’s payments landscape by enabling faster, more efficient international payments for businesses and consumers.

The strategic collaboration will leverage Nium’s real-time payments infrastructure by integrating it into Ecobank’s existing banking operations, enhancing services for SMEs.

The bank will connect its existing Swift workflows,a system that enables secure and fast money transfers to international bank accounts, allowing Nium to gain access to real-time transfers, updates, clearing, settlement, and payment tracking, eliminating the need for complex Application Programming Interfaces (API) integrations, a process utilised to connect two or more systems to conduct actions and exchange data. 

This allows Ecobank to exchange its Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications message type (SwiftMT) and ISO20022 messages, formats used to send messages to the financial SWIFT network.

Without the need for complex API integrations, Ecobank says this will significantly reduce waiting times for cross-border payments, enabling businesses to make faster payments to over 220 markets, including over 100 countries with real-time capabilities.

“This collaboration represents an important step forward in expanding our global payments network, and we are proud to support Ecobank in delivering faster, more efficient payments for its customers across the region,” said Anupam Pahuja, general manager and executive VP for APAC, Middle East and Africa at Nium.

“Partnering with Nium allows us to enhance our service offerings and provide our customers with faster, more efficient cross-border payment solutions. By leveraging our unique API-based payment platform, this collaboration is a significant step towards advancing financial inclusion and connectivity across Africa and enabling businesses to thrive in a global marketplace,” added Jeremy Awori, CEO of Ecobank Group.