PawaPay CFO: Banks risk repeating their mobile money mistake

Twenty years ago, African banks looked at mobile money and shrugged. Hundreds of millions of unbanked people moving small sums through basic handsets didn’t look like a market worth fighting for. That single miscalculation handed telcos control of a payments ecosystem now processing roughly $1.4 trillion a year, and banks have spent two decades trying to buy, partner or regulate their way back into a market they once dismissed as beneath them.

Aaron Markowitz-Shulman, CFO of pan-African payments infrastructure firm PawaPay, thinks the same mistake is unfolding with stablecoins, and he isn’t convinced anyone in a boardroom has learned from the first round.

“They didn’t spot the megatrend,” he says of the banking sector’s response to mobile money, describing an industry that prioritised protecting an already profitable model over recognising the opportunity sitting in an underserved market.

Markowitz-Shulman is unsentimental about the jargon that surrounds this conversation. “Blockchain, stablecoin, crypto, tokenisation, DeFi, Web3, Layer 3 – it’s all a bit of a word salad,” he says, pointing to a bandwagon effect where companies rebrand as stablecoin-native simply because it’s fashionable to do so.

Strip the noise away, and the distinction that actually matters is a simple one. “When companies like PawaPay talk about digital assets or crypto, we’re really referring to stablecoins like USDC and USDT. These are collateralised dollar instruments,” he explains.

“Bitcoin, Doge and Melaniacoin are speculative assets, or more generously, non-collateralised stores of value. They serve entirely different functions.”

A missed $1.4T mobile money opportunity and the $205bn stablecoins opportunity they mustn’t miss

The scale behind that distinction is real.

Tether claims its USDT’s 2025 on-chain transfer volume is north of $13 trillion, averaging $35 billion a day. Chainalysis data puts on-chain crypto value flowing through sub-Saharan Africa at just over $205 billion between mid-2024 and mid-2025, with stablecoins accounting for close to 43% of that regional volume.

Ask Markowitz-Shulman what stablecoins are actually good for, and he draws a sharp line between infrastructure and consumer experience. “On stability, infrastructure means standardised operating frameworks, reliable counterparties and traceable transfer of value,” he says.

“I’m sure if you ask any CFO in a pan-African business, they’ll also have stories about waiting for transfers to land, or SWIFT messages that take days to materialise.”

That’s the gap stablecoins have quietly filled. “Stablecoins are already a settlement rail, and at the current pace, they seem on track to be the settlement rail,” he says.

Crucially, he doesn’t think this displaces the systems already working at street level. “Stablecoins are not replacing how individuals pay for things. You still need cash or mobile money to buy a mango on the street in Nairobi or dinner at Tribe,” he says. 

“The digitisation of that layer is solved, and solved well, with a billion mobile money wallets across the continent.” What stablecoins solve instead is the layer above it: the cross-border leg that, for decades, has often left the continent entirely before coming back, routed through correspondent banks in London or New York, with every hop adding cost, delay and operational risk. It’s a large part of why Kenya, in particular, has emerged as one of the world’s more active markets for transactional stablecoin use, precisely where traditional cross-border rails are weakest.

The speed comparison, in his telling, isn’t close. “Correspondent banking over SWIFT can take days to settle in African markets. A stablecoin leg settles in minutes.” But he’s careful not to oversell it; the efficiency stops at the last mile. Getting from a stablecoin at the border into local currency, into a wallet, and into someone’s hands still requires licences, liquidity and the operational capability to deliver reliably.

That gap is exactly why so many cross-border stablecoin operators have sprung up where the barriers to entry are low, while the number of last-mile players who can actually deliver at scale across Africa remains comparatively small.

The reputational excuse is running off road

For banks tempted to keep watching from a safe distance, Markowitz-Shulman doesn’t think that’s a neutral choice. “That watching is the safe option. Why sit back and observe when you could shape the outcome?” Banks, in his view, already hold what this market is short of: regulatory standing and deep pools of local currency. Deployed properly, that’s enough to accelerate the last mile themselves rather than cede it.

And if reputational caution is the real hesitation, two recent moves undercut it. Mastercard has agreed to acquire stablecoin infrastructure firm BVNK in a deal worth up to $1.8 billion, one of the largest bets yet by a major card network on stablecoin rails becoming mainstream plumbing.

And in July 2026, SWIFT, the messaging network behind the overwhelming majority of international bank-to-bank transfers, took its own blockchain-based shared ledger live, with 17 banks across six continents, including South Africa’s FirstRand, piloting round-the-clock tokenised cross-border payments. 

When a fifty-year-old pillar of correspondent banking starts moving onto shared ledgers, Markowitz-Shulman’s point lands: waiting stops looking like prudence and starts looking like drift.

What adapting well actually looks like

So what separates a bank that adapts from one that repeats the mobile money mistake?

“Banks need to lean in,” he says, pointing to the scale of capital already moving: Mastercard’s BVNK deal and what he describes as Tether and Circle “splashing cash around like giddy VCs” to drive adoption and lock in ecosystem ownership. “Banks are in a genuinely unique position to drive a reduction in friction and benefit financially.”

Concretely, that means becoming the fiat endpoint. The local currency liquidity provider is the regulated custodian for flows that are arriving, whether banks participate or not. “Banks that do this convert a structural advantage into fee income,” he says. “Adapting badly looks exactly like missing the mobile money boat.”

On regulators, he’s similarly unsentimental. “Realistically, the horse has bolted,” he says, of any hope that rulemaking can get ahead of flows already moving hundreds of billions of dollars a year. His advice to regulators and bank executives alike is the same: engage with the people already solving the problem, rather than spending years perfecting a framework for flows that have long since moved on.

Pushed on the biggest risk in stablecoins becoming payments infrastructure at scale, Markowitz-Shulman identifies two, and neither is really about the technology.

The first is proliferation. The same qualities that make stablecoins easy to adopt make them easy to build a business around, and the market is filled with operators of wildly uneven quality. For businesses, he argues, the real exposure isn’t the stablecoin itself; it’s the counterparty holding the funds, managing liquidity and moving money across jurisdictions.

“Most failures in this market won’t be technology failures. They’ll be operational failures,” he says, urging businesses to choose partners on licensing, regulatory depth and track record rather than the polish of an app.

The second is assuming stablecoins replace payment infrastructure outright. They don’t. Stablecoins solve cross-border settlement exceptionally well, but businesses still need licensed local rails, compliance, FX and reliable last-mile payout underneath them.

“The winners won’t be those who choose between stablecoins and local infrastructure,” he says. “There’ll be those who combine both.”

Asked to project forward, Markowitz-Shulman’s ambition is almost anticlimactic by design. “My hope, and PawaPay’s ambition, is that in five years, nobody doing business in Africa thinks about payments any more than they do in Belgium, Singapore or Canada. Money in, money out, money across borders, without a treasury workstream attached.” Infrastructure that works, in other words, becomes boring, and he thinks boring payments in Africa would be a genuinely historic achievement.