Last September, a merchant processing payments in Ghana lost $10,731 in seven days.

He didn't make a bad call. He didn't misread the market.The exchange rate moved 9.87% in seven days. His money sat in his account the entire time. By the time he converted, it wasn't worth what it was a week earlier.

This is one story from 12 months of data. We've combed through Startbutton's transaction records from August 2025 to July 2026 — 1.9 million payments, 200+ merchants, 15 markets — trying to understand what it actually costs to move money across Africa when the infrastructure is right and when it isn't.

Today we're publishing the 2026 State of Merchant of Record in Africa report. It's the most detailed look we've done at the payment layer — approval rates by market, FX exposure across seven currencies, settlement window volatility, the real cost of running payment infrastructure in-house, and how digital tax enforcement has shifted across the continent in the last 18 months.

What we found

The gap between companies operating on the right infrastructure and those that aren't is larger than most people budget for.

In Nigeria, merchants running virtual account rails hit a 99.45% approval rate across 1.19 million transactions. The broader market average is 96.85%. That gap sounds small. At scale, across a full year, it translated to an estimated $2.4M in recovered revenue for one group of merchants — money that was disappearing at the transaction layer, not from anything the customer did wrong.

In Ghana, the story is different. The approval rate is 88.16%, driven largely by MTN MoMo downtime. The FX numbers are less forgiving. The cedi moved across a 23.7% range over the 12-month window we tracked. Merchants settling in GHS experienced adverse 7-day swings more than half the time.

The cost of doing this in-house is also higher than most companies realise. Hans Osnabrugge, CEO of Talk360 — a company connecting over 6 million people across Africa — put it plainly: building and maintaining their own African payment infrastructure was costing $500,000 a year before they moved to a Merchant of Record model.

What's in the report

The 2026 State of MoR in Africa covers five sections:

Part I looks at the external forces reshaping African payments right now — the exits that changed the market, processor liability shifts, digital tax enforcement, PAPSS, and the stablecoin question.

Part II breaks down where revenue actually goes: entity costs, FX spreads at settlement, the approval rate gap, the cost of settlement delays, and what the in-house build really costs.

Part III goes inside two companies. Talk360's Hans Osnabrugge on what expanding across African markets cost before and after getting infrastructure right. Luzana Costa, Partner at Norrsken, on what early-stage investors look for — and what they find — when evaluating how companies are structured for African growth.

Part IV is a five-point playbook for merchants operating or expanding across African markets.

The data window is August 2025 to July 2026. Primary interviews were conducted in June and July 2026. The methodology is in the appendix.

The 2026 State of MoR in Africa is free. Download the 2026 State of MoR in Africa →