On 30 September 2026 the BCEAO published the list of 175 banks, wallets and payment firms cleared to offer π-SPI to the public, and I read it as the end of the wallet sticker as a moat.
The list covers all eight UEMOA countries. Côte d'Ivoire alone has 38 names on it, including Wave and MTN Money. The date was not random. It was the deadline the central bank had set for banks, e-money issuers and payment institutions to connect, one year to the day after it launched the platform in Dakar.
Interoperability moves the fight up a layer
Until now, a customer was stuck inside the network of their own bank or wallet. To pay someone on another network, people often withdrew cash and deposited it again on the other side. That friction is what made the sticker on the counter so valuable. If a shop showed one wallet's code, that wallet owned the shop's customers by default.
π-SPI removes that friction for everyone. A payment goes through in under ten seconds and both sides get a notice. The BCEAO says a single standard QR code can accept every type of payment. When every account can pay every till, the brand of the account stops deciding who wins the shop.
The consequence of this is structural. Moving the money becomes a commodity that anyone connected can offer. The moment of payment stays valuable. Whoever runs that moment keeps the receipt, the phone number, the order history and the next sale.
The habit is not set yet
The central bank's own numbers show how early this is. In the ten months to 20 July 2026, π-SPI carried about one million transactions worth 110 billion F CFA. Over the same period, 30 million people could be reached through connected institutions. The rail found its users before it found its uses.
That gap is the opening. Habits at the till form once and then stay for years. Whoever sits at the moment of payment while those habits form will be very hard to move later.
Merchants and platforms are the athletes
The central bank built the stadium and chose not to run in the race. Banks and wallets will compete to be the account a customer pays from. The merchants and platforms that sell are the ones who play every single day.
A seamstress in Treichville sells to the same women every month. A school collects fees from the same parents every term. A marketplace sells on behalf of many small vendors at once. Each of them lives on repeat customers, and repeat customers are a data problem before they are a marketing problem.
Whoever controls the payment controls the relationship
If the customer pays inside someone else's app, that app learns what they bought, when they bought it and how often they come back. The merchant gets a notification and very little else. One side keeps a customer and the other side keeps a receipt.
That was tolerable when there was no alternative. It is now a choice. The rail itself is now public. The checkout, the payment link, the invoice and the till are still private, and that is where the relationship lives.
A merchant who lets someone else run the payment is renting their own customers.
What to do on Monday
Look at how your customers paid you last week. Ask who kept their phone number after each payment. If the answer is not you, move the payment to a place you control, such as your own page, your own link or your own till. Keep the record of who paid in your own books, not in someone else's app.
lomi. is the small team trying to make a dent here, with a checkout built for π-SPI with a licensed partner so the merchant keeps both the till and the customer.
lomi. is payment infrastructure for francophone West Africa. Accept payments, send payouts, and automate financial workflows with ease. To learn more about what drives our product roadmap, read our blog, visit our GitHub, connect your AI agent to our services, or just create an account.