With modern rails and new e‑payment rules, Tanzania is turning digital money into real‑world habit and business value.
Tanzania is the largest country in East Africa, with an economy built on agriculture that supports most of the population, mining that moves high value under heavy regulation and tourism that earns much of its foreign exchange – its payment system has to work for all three.
For years, cash has done most of the work in that economy, but from the beginning of July, a new law required those payments to be made electronically. “People think the journey began with mobile money, but it started much earlier,” says Shomari Shija, Sybrin’s Business Development Manager in Tanzania.
One layer, many players
The Bank of Tanzania began laying the rails and modernising national payments infrastructure more than 20 years ago with a clearing house, the Tanzania Interbank Settlement System (TISS) and electronic funds transfer, well before M-Pesa launched around 2008. Mobile money interoperability, the Tanzania Instant Payments System (TIPS) and the TanQR code standard followed.
“Mobile money initially solved consumer problems, but it didn’t focus on helping businesses operate more efficiently,” explains Shija. Small and medium enterprises and corporates sat outside that first wave, and much of the work since has been adapting a consumer system to commercial use. According to Shija, those organisations now need automated reconciliation, clearer visibility over payments, integration with enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and real-time fraud control.
Before TIPS, financial institutions connected to one another individually and every new bilateral integration added cost and complexity. TIPS replaced that arrangement with a single interoperability platform through which banks and payment service providers exchange payments in real-time.
For Tanzanian customers, transactions are faster and more reliable and the cost of moving money between banks, wallets and fintech services has dropped. For banks and fintechs, it cuts integration costs and makes it easier for a smaller player to plug into an established institution. TIPS now carries a growing share of government payments and cross-border remittances.
“When payments are electronic, you can track how funds move from one point to another,” he continues. “That improves transparency, strengthens governance and helps tackle issues like money laundering.”
Real-time visibility gives government a clearer picture of tax collection, while companies get faster collections and cleaner reconciliation. “At the same time, transaction costs are still relatively high for many Tanzanians,” says Shija. “If we want everyone on board, government has to look at that and consider some adjustments.”
Habit over access
Financial inclusion has come a long way in 10 to 15 years, although Shija identifies smallholder farmers, informal traders, rural communities and micro-enterprises as still underserved.
“Access is not the main challenge anymore. With mobile penetration, many people already have access to digital financial services. The challenge is encouraging meaningful, regular usage,” he adds. Someone will happily use a wallet to send money to a relative, then pay a trader in cash without a second thought, which is what affordable products, simpler registration, stronger digital identity and financial literacy are meant to change. “Technology on its own won’t solve financial inclusion. It has to be combined with education, trust and products that create real value for customers,” he says.
Most SMEs and corporates in Tanzania already hold an account with a bank or a mobile operator, so the difficulty has moved to what happens once the money arrives. Hours still go into matching payments to invoices by hand, and what they want instead is a single real-time view of collections, liquidity and transactions across every bank and channel.
“Businesses are no longer asking for faster payments; they’re asking for smarter payments,” says Shija. “A few years ago, banks focused on launching mobile apps and internet banking. Today, they’re modernising the platforms behind those channels.”
Sybrin’s work sits in that modernisation, updating existing environments without unnecessary disruption. “We’ve moved from expanding access to transforming the entire financial ecosystem,” he ends. “The next chapter isn’t just about digitising payments, it’s about making payments intelligent, connected and effortless.”
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