Mr Yared Woldesenbet - Regional Director Visa
Mr Daniel Essoo, CEO, Mauritius Bankers Association
Dr. Drishtysingh Ramdenee, Secretary General of the Mauritius Chamber of Commerce and Industry
Members of the banking and financial community
The Visa team
Ladies and Gentlemen
Good afternoon.
I am pleased to be with you today for the Visa Direct Day. I would like to thank Visa for organising this event and inviting me to share my perspectives in an area that is at the forefront of central banks’ vision and priorities.
The payment systems continue to shape how quickly commerce moves, how securely consumers transact, how confidently businesses expand, and how effectively economies connect to regional and global value chains. At a time when digitalisation is gaining momentum, efficient and trusted payment systems have emerged as key instruments of competitiveness, inclusion, innovation, and confidence in the monetary system.
Globally, payments are being redefined by technology, regulatory modernisation, and changing market competition. Real-time payments, mobile wallets, artificial intelligence, embedded finance, and digital assets are making payments faster, more programmable, more data-rich and more deeply integrated into commerce. This shift raises expectations for speed, security, transparency, and interoperability.
It is imperative for the Mauritius IFC to preserve its appeal by continuously maintaining a secure, well-regulated, and outward-looking platform that connects Africa, Asia and the wider global economy through infrastructure that is efficient, interoperable, resilient, and trusted.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
The architecture of finance is being redefined. So are the responsibilities of central banks, regulators, financial institutions, and technology providers.
Central banks are modernising payment infrastructures, strengthening oversight frameworks, and examining new forms of money, including Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and stablecoins. These developments need to take place in a coordinated manner by involving different stakeholders as payment systems are critical national infrastructure and support monetary confidence, financial stability, market integrity, inclusion, and economic efficiency.
The payments landscape is constantly evolving. Banks, card schemes, fintechs, mobile money providers, platform companies, digital asset firms, and decentralised infrastructures now coexist in the ecosystem. This diversity has encouraged innovation but also increased fragmentation. Without interoperability, common standards, and regulatory alignment, innovation can produce complexity rather than efficiency. The real test of a modern payment system is therefore not speed alone, but trust, resilience, transparency, and connectivity.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
This challenge is particularly relevant for Africa. Across the continent, cross-border payments remain too slow, too costly, and too complex. According to the September 2025 World Bank’s Remittance Businesses Prices Worldwide, it costs between 8% to 8.5% to send money to Africa. The continent faces fragmented regulation, limited interoperability, weak transparency, and dependence on intermediary currencies. These frictions constrain trade, raise transaction costs, weaken financial inclusion, and limit the full potential of digital commerce.
Yet this challenge also creates a strategic opening. Jurisdictions that can offer trust, regulatory clarity, operational efficiency, and connectivity will be able to serve as bridges between markets. Mauritius is well placed to play precisely this role. Our value proposition is not based on geographic scale; it rests on institutional credibility, regulatory reliability, multilingual capability, and a long-standing reputation as a trusted international financial centre.
The Mauritius IFC can therefore act as a central node for cross-border payments, treasury management, and regional financial coordination, particularly for businesses operating across Africa. For regional and global firms, the ability to manage collections, settlements, liquidity, reconciliation, and reporting from a single trusted jurisdiction is not merely convenient; it is a strategic necessity.
Through Mauritian structures, firms can collect payments in multiple currencies, consolidate funds, centralise treasury functions, and manage liquidity across diverse markets. In a fragmented environment, aggregation matters. A single point of coordination can reduce operational complexity, improve visibility over cash flows, strengthen reconciliation, and allow businesses to move from country-by-country payment management to a more coherent regional operating model.
Our jurisdiction brings together strengths that few others combine: political and economic stability, a recognised regulatory framework, multi-currency capability, openness to capital flows, and a sophisticated professional services ecosystem. This predictability is an asset for firms navigating currency volatility, regulatory change, and heightened risk sensitivity.
Mauritius also offers practical advantages: a time zone bridging Asia and Africa, a skilled and multilingual workforce, developed legal, compliance, accounting, technology and financial services capabilities, and digital infrastructure on which more advanced payment services can be built. Domestically, the foundations are already visible through growing digital adoption, mobile wallets, QR-based payments, and electronic transfers. Visa is a leading actor in our payments landscape. Its partnership with local banks and fintechs is allowing Mauritian businesses and consumers to securely transact globally through interoperable and innovative digital payment solutions such as contactless payments, digital wallets, and tokenization.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Mauritius is not approaching payment innovation solely as an offshore proposition. It is building capability at home and using it to support a broader regional vision. The growth of digital payments domestically, together with the emergence of stronger innovation platforms, provides a practical foundation for Mauritius to act with credibility beyond its borders.
Our innovation agenda reinforces this positioning. The Bank of Mauritius Innovation Hub, Innov8, is intended to provide a structured platform for collaboration among regulators, banks, fintechs, technology providers, academia and other stakeholders. A knowledge-sharing workshop on recent developments in payments delivered by Visa was hosted at Innov8 earlier this year. This illustrates the importance of having appropriate fora and events such today’s to foster experimentation, dialogue and the responsible development of new ideas in banking and payments. In parallel, domestic regulatory frameworks allow controlled experimentation, including in digital assets and tokenisation. Moreover, the Mauritius Africa FinTech Hub connects innovators, investors, institutions and technology partners around solutions that can serve both Mauritius and the African continent.
Above all, Mauritius can act as a gateway to African opportunity. It can offer global capital a trusted platform, provide fintech firms with an environment in which to test and scale, and support regional businesses seeking to operate across markets with different regulation, infrastructure, currencies and payment preferences. As intra-African trade and digital commerce accelerate, the demand for trusted, efficient, and interoperable payment infrastructure will intensify. Mauritius should respond not by replacing domestic payment systems across Africa, but by connecting them, complementing them, and enabling firms to operate across them with greater certainty.
The immediate opportunities are concrete. Intra-African trade, remittances, digital commerce and regional corporate expansion all require payment solutions that are faster, cheaper, and more transparent. Yet many corridors remain constrained by high costs, currency complexity, limited interoperability and fragmented regulation. Mauritius can address these frictions by serving as an aggregation, settlement, clearing and treasury platform, helping businesses collect, consolidate, reconcile and disburse funds across jurisdictions without displacing national payment systems.
The country also has the potential to serve the digital trade economy. E-commerce platforms, digital marketplaces, subscription services, travel platforms, education providers and other digital businesses require integrated payment capabilities across borders. They must accept payments in multiple currencies, manage merchant flows, settle partners and comply with different regulatory and reporting obligations. Mauritius can provide a trusted base for payment orchestration, multi-currency processing and digital platform payments, allowing firms to manage complex flows from a single centre while maintaining governance, transparency and compliance.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Mauritius can engage responsibly with digital assets and tokenised payments. The country has already taken steps to regulate virtual assets, custodian services and tokenisation, creating a framework in which innovation can proceed under clear supervisory expectations. Over time, tokenised deposits, stable-value instruments and digital settlement frameworks may support faster cross-border settlement, reduce reliance on intermediary chains and enable new forms of programmable finance. But these possibilities must be pursued with discipline. Innovation in money and payments must always be anchored in governance, risk management, financial integrity and legal clarity.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Enabling responsible experimentation while ensuring consumer protection, cyber resilience, financial integrity, and systemic stability remain non-negotiable. This is especially true for cross-border payments. Their speed, scale, multi-jurisdictional character, and reliance on chains of intermediaries make strong safeguards indispensable.
Financial integrity is a top priority. Fast, high-volume cross-border payment platforms may be exposed to money laundering, terrorist financing, fraud, cyber-enabled crime, sanctions evasion, and the misuse of complex corporate structures. The very qualities that make modern payments valuable—speed, reach, automation, and convenience—can be exploited where controls are weak, inconsistent, or poorly coordinated.
The international policy direction should be clear: cross-border payments must become faster, cheaper, more transparent, and more inclusive, but never at the expense of safety and security. Inconsistent implementation of AML/CFT requirements can increase cost, reduce speed, limit access, and weaken transparency. For a jurisdiction seeking to be a trusted hub, the answer is not lighter standards; it is smarter, risk-based, and consistently enforced high standards of transparency, compliance, governance, beneficial ownership scrutiny, sanctions screening, customer due diligence, and transaction monitoring.
Cross-border payment activity requires firms to navigate different licensing regimes, AML/CFT obligations, data protection rules, customer due diligence expectations, and supervisory practices. Divergence across jurisdictions can create uncertainty for firms and friction for payment providers.
Mauritius aims to position itself as a jurisdiction that reduces this complexity rather than amplifies it. That requires clear rules, predictable supervisory engagement, alignment with international standards, and practical frameworks that allow payment service providers, banks, fintechs, and international businesses to operate responsibly across markets.
Another key responsibility is technological and cyber resilience. As payments become more digital, more interconnected, and increasingly real-time, cyber resilience becomes central to financial stability and public confidence. A payment hub can succeed only if users, institutions, and counterparties trust that transactions will be processed securely, data will be protected, and services will remain available under stress.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Let me now turn to the future. The opportunity before us will not be realised by aspiration alone. It will require clear priorities, sustained investment, disciplined execution, and a shared commitment to building a payments ecosystem that is interoperable, trusted, innovative, and regionally connected.
Interoperability is not a technical preference; it is a strategic necessity. It determines whether banks, fintechs, payment service providers, domestic platforms, and regional networks can communicate securely, efficiently, and at scale.
This means linking domestic systems with regional and global networks, supporting seamless bank-fintech integration, and adopting international messaging standards such as ISO 20022. Structured and consistent payment data can improve transparency, reduce friction, enhance compliance, support automation, and strengthen the efficiency of cross-border payments.
No payment hub can operate in isolation, and no single jurisdiction can solve cross-border payment frictions on its own. The strength of a hub lies in the quality of its networks, the reliability of its institutions, and the confidence it earns from regional partners.
Mauritius is therefore working on strengthening cooperation with African central banks, regional payment systems, multilateral institutions, and private-sector operators. Such cooperation can advance regulatory dialogue, shared standards, settlement connectivity, technical assistance, and practical solutions for firms operating across borders.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
The future of payments will increasingly involve new forms of digital value, including central bank digital currencies, tokenised deposits, and cross-border digital settlement frameworks.
CBDCs may offer new possibilities for faster, cheaper, more transparent, and less intermediated cross-border payments. Tokenised deposits and digital settlement models could also support programmable finance, liquidity management, and settlement finality. But these innovations must be explored carefully. Experimentation must be accompanied by governance, legal certainty, cyber resilience, operational safeguards, and financial integrity controls.
The future of payments will not be built by the public sector alone, nor by banks, fintechs, payment service providers, or technology firms acting independently. It will require a coordinated ecosystem in which each participant contributes to a common national and regional objective.
Innovation platforms can foster dialogue, testing, learning, and co-creation. They serve as bridges between policy and market practice, allowing new payment ideas to be assessed responsibly before they are scaled into the wider financial system.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
The future of payments is being written today. It will be shaped by the choices we make on infrastructure, regulation, technology, and collaboration—and by our ability to translate strategic intent into disciplined execution. Mauritius has already shown that it can move early, decisively, and strategically.
Leveraging the Mauritius IFC as a payment systems hub is not merely an investment in infrastructure, it is about building a platform of trust, connectivity, and opportunity that can support domestic innovation, reinforce the country’s role as a financial centre, and contribute to Africa’s wider journey towards economic integration and digital transformation.
Turning this vision into reality requires collective and coordinated action. If Mauritius can successfully demonstrate that its ambition goes hand in hand with discipline, innovation with responsibility, and national purpose with regional collaboration, it can help shape the next chapter of payments in Africa and beyond.
I thank you for your attention.
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Dr Priscilla S. Muthoora Thakoor
Governor of the Bank of Mauritius
17 June 2026
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