The Cheque Isn't Slow. It's a Witness.

Something in the BCEAO's 2025 annual report has been sitting with me.

In SICA-UEMOA — the clearing system that carries everyday transfers and cheques between banks across the eight-country union — the cheque now accounts for 24.6% of transactions. A quarter. Falling year on year.

It still carries 71.7% of the value.

Put those two numbers side by side and you have the whole story. Almost nobody writes cheques anymore. But when the amount is large enough to matter, the cheque is still what people reach for.

A note on scope, because I don't write press releases. Those percentages sit inside SICA-UEMOA, not the whole union. SICA moved 88,465 billion FCFA in 2025 across 31.2 million operations. STAR-UEMOA, which handles large-value interbank settlement, moved 1,248,000 billion across 1.87 million. So cheques are not 71% of all money in the zone. They are 71% of the money inside the system where ordinary companies actually pay each other — which, if you are selling into this market, is the system that concerns you.

The rail is real

On 30 September 2025, at its Dakar headquarters, the BCEAO switched on PI-SPI — the Plateforme Interopérable du Système de Paiement Instantané.

What it does is not modest. Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Senegal, Togo. Money between a bank account, a mobile-money wallet and a microfinance account, in seconds, at any hour of any day. A phone number instead of a RIB — and anyone who has ever tried to dictate a RIB over a bad line knows what that alone is worth.

By 31 December 2025, three months in, 74 institutions were connected and open to the public: 58 banks, seven electronic-money establishments, nine microfinance institutions. By 24 June 2026, 80 participants connected, 74 in live testing. The connection deadline moved from 30 June to 30 September 2026 for banks and payment institutions, and to 30 June 2027 for microfinance.

I have written before about that deadline slipping. I am not going to write about it again. The rail exists, it works, and pretending otherwise would be lazy.

There is a different line in the design that nobody picked up.

Once a PI-SPI transaction is validated, it is irrevocable. No recall. No stop payment. It is gone.

That is correct engineering. It is also the reason your finance director is still writing cheques.

What a cheque actually is here

A cheque was never really a payment method in this market. It is a governance document.

When someone hands you a cheque in Plateau, he is not handing you money. He is handing you a piece of paper carrying a name, a date, a signature, and a delay. Somebody had to sign it. In most houses somebody else had to counter-sign it. And between that signature and the money there is a gap — hours, sometimes days — inside which a mistake can still be caught.

The delay is not the flaw. The delay is the product.

Go to Adjamé and watch a serious transaction close. Nobody moves a large sum alone. Someone comes with him. Someone sees it happen. That instinct is not backwardness and it is not superstition. It is a control system, built by people who worked out a long time ago that the real danger was never slowness. The danger is finality with nobody else in the room.

Big money in this market has never travelled alone. It travels with a witness.

PI-SPI removed the paper, removed the counter-signature, removed the delay — and kept the finality.

So the read isn't "adoption is slow"

The read is that the region built the rail faster than companies built the authority to use it.

And the gap is not between the BCEAO and the banks. It is inside the companies.

Ask a DAF in Abidjan who is permitted to release 100 million francs from a phone, alone, on a Sunday at three in the morning, with no way to reverse it. In most firms here that person does not exist. Not because the technology is missing. Because nobody has written the rule.

The sharpest version of this I have heard came from Ulrich Kouadio, who builds on the platform: before, governance sat with the company and control sat with the bank. Now the company carries both.

That is the whole shift in one sentence, and it has a cost nobody is putting a number on. The bank was doing that control for free. It was folded into the relationship, it appeared on no budget line, and most finance directors never thought of it as a service they were receiving. Now it has to be built or bought.

A large corporate calls that a project. An SME in Abidjan calls it an unbudgeted expense, for a risk it has not yet lived through.

Which is where this becomes a market question rather than a technical one. The firms that need instant settlement most — tight cash, suppliers waiting, payroll that cannot slip — are precisely the firms least able to fund a control layer. If that layer stays expensive, the rail serves first the companies that could already afford to wait two days.

Until it exists, a company with full PI-SPI access will keep doing what it has always done: small payments digitally, and the payment that actually matters on paper, with a witness.

That is not resistance to change. That is a board doing its job with the only tool it was given.

What this means if you are entering

One. Do not read "instant payments are live across eight countries" as "you can collect instantly across eight countries." The rail reaches the institution. It does not reach your customer's approval chain.

Two. If you are selling B2B here, price for the cheque. Your large invoices will be settled on paper, on a delay, for longer than your model assumes. Build the working-capital line for it now rather than discovering it in month nine.

Three. If you are building payments, the gap is not another wallet. It is the authorisation layer — thresholds, dual approval, an audit trail a DAF can show a board. The rail is a commodity now. The governance on top of it is not, and the builders already working on it say the hard part is not the API.

Four. Watch the 2026 figures, not the 2025 ones. The BCEAO published no PI-SPI transaction count for 2025 — reasonable for a system three months old, but it means traction is still an open question. Guest list is not usage.

The BCEAO built something genuinely good and got the hard part right: it works, it is regional, it is instant, it is final.

Finality is a feature for a payment system and a terror for the person who signs.

So the question is not which of your payments deserves those twenty seconds.

It is who, in your company, is allowed to press it.

Sources

• BCEAO, Rapport Annuel 2025 — SICA-UEMOA and STAR-UEMOA volumes and values; cheque share of clearing-system value (71.7%) and volume (24.6%); 74 institutions connected as at 31 December 2025.
• BCEAO, Communiqué — Prolongation du délai de connexion à PI-SPI (June 2026) — 80 participants connected and 74 in live testing as at 24 June 2026; deadlines of 30 September 2026 and 30 June 2027.
• BCEAO, Lancement officiel de la Plateforme Interopérable du Système de Paiement Instantané (PI-SPI) — launch 30 September 2025; eight member states; ISO 20022; irrevocability on validation.

Written from Abidjan. Every figure above was checked against the primary source before publication.