Adding a payment service provider can take just a few days on paper. But who pays the price of maintaining it, managing incidents, and keeping everything running smoothly day to day?
Today, a Cameroonian entrepreneur can pay for overseas hosting, subscribe to American business software, or fund advertising campaigns on an international platform. Their customers, meanwhile, may pay for their purchases using Mobile Money or bank cards.
These use cases show that digital payments extend far beyond national borders. Yet the infrastructures that make them possible remain fragmented.
In Francophone Africa, this trend is becoming increasingly significant. According to a 2025 survey published by the International Trade Centre, covering 5,453 businesses across 18 countries, 46% of the businesses surveyed sell online, and 83% of online sellers accept electronic payments.
As a business grows, its needs grow with it. Reaching new customers and moving to the next stage of growth often requires offering the right payment methods. It is a sign that the business is gaining traction. Naturally, companies bring in new partners to keep pace with that growth.
By 2026, connecting a payment service provider (PSP) has become more accessible. But is managing it over the long term just as easy?
Integrating a provider involves more than connecting an API.
Businesses must handle notifications, transaction statuses, errors, testing, and technical updates. Once the system is live, teams still need to maintain it and monitor its performance.
The GSMA identified integration cost and speed as two of the main challenges cited in a study on Mobile Money APIs. For each of these factors, 71% of respondents expressed concern.
These figures do not represent every African business, nor do they establish an average cost per integration. They do, however, show that technical integration is already a significant concern for the stakeholders surveyed.
More importantly, the work does not stop once the system goes live.
Three providers, three integrations, three times the headache
Consider a business using CinetPay, Flutterwave, and Paystack.
Each provider may serve a specific purpose. But the business must also manage the particularities of each integration, track transactions, and mobilize its teams whenever an incident occurs.
A technical change, a processing error, or a transaction status that is difficult to interpret may require additional intervention.
As integrations multiply, monitoring and financial reconciliation can become increasingly complex.
The cost does not always appear on an invoice. It shows up in development hours, maintenance, troubleshooting, and the time teams can no longer devote to other priorities.
The hidden cost is therefore not limited to the initial integration. It also includes the work required to keep the entire system running reliably.
The problem is not the number of providers. It is how they are managed.
That is one reason the GSMA has worked on harmonizing Mobile Money APIs to facilitate integrations and reduce provider-specific development.
The real calculation businesses need to make
The initial price is not enough. To assess the total cost, a business must also measure:
Time spent on development and testing.
Maintenance required for each integration.
Monitoring and incident diagnosis.
Transaction reconciliation.
Technical and financial team resources allocated to payment operations.
Businesses must also distinguish between transactions that are genuinely lost and those that can be recovered. Without reliable data, claiming a universal cost or a specific percentage of savings would be misleading.
The first step is therefore to measure the cost of the current setup. The next is to identify what can be simplified.
WAJUB: Orchestration for better payment operations
WAJUB is developing a payment orchestration infrastructure that enables businesses to manage multiple payment service providers from a single environment.
This approach aims to simplify transaction monitoring, reduce duplicated technical logic, and make it easier to manage multiple integrations.
Orchestration also makes it possible to define routing rules between providers. A business can then use an alternative payment route when technical conditions allow.
This will not eliminate transaction fees or magically resolve every network outage. However, it gives businesses a more structured and streamlined way to manage payments while reducing repetitive tasks that place increasing pressure on teams as the business grows.
If you want to regain control of your payment infrastructure and stop spending unnecessary time on maintenance, follow WAJUB’s progress.