Wave Mobile Money

When the BCEAO-backed instant interoperable payment platform PI-SPI launched across the West African Economic and Monetary Union on September 30, 2025 with 31 participating providers, Wave Mobile Money -- whose business model is built on a 1% transfer fee -- was conspicuously absent from the initial cohort. Wave only joined roughly a year later, around October 2026, as the regulator (BCEAO) moved to make PI-SPI participation mandatory ahead of a November 2, 2026 deadline and simultaneously capped mobile-money transfer fees (free for transfers up to 8,000 CFA francs/day, 0.8% above that). Industry analysts noted that free interoperable transfers directly threatened to erode Wave's fee-based competitive advantage, which had become a pricing benchmark across its markets, making the delay a strategic holdout rather than a technical one. A Senegalese lawmaker separately accused competitor Orange Money of shifting costs to withdrawal fees to blunt the same interoperability mandate, illustrating sector-wide resistance to the lower-fee system that regulators were trying to mandate for consumers' benefit.