South Africa had real-time clearing in 2006. The fact is public and easy to misuse, because a rail being live does not mean it is used.
I heard the point again on Between the Seams with Stitch: PayShap sits near one transaction per person per month, while Pix sits in the thirties. The gap between them has nothing to do with a missing API.
The protocol is the easy part
You can switch money in seconds and still lose to cash. That happens when the merchant has to explain the price, when the shop cannot spend the settlement tonight, when the code at the till works for only one brand, or when fraud arrives after the message instead of travelling with it.
A national rail that wants volume has to win those fights on purpose, with incentives for the banks, a price that does not push people back to notes, consistency across operators and rules that travel with the payment.
What transfers, and what does not
The mechanism transfers: cash is the competitor, certainty is working capital, and a live rail can sit unused if the commercial model is wrong.
The institutions do not transfer, because UEMOA is not South Africa. We will not copy a foreign switch and call it a product, and we will not try to run a central-bank programme from a startup office.
What this means for lomi.
We confirm a payment when the rail confirms it. We do not operate the national switch, and we do not claim a ten-second merchant settlement that we do not run.
Our job is the layer on top: the page the buyer finishes, the routing, the books that match and the identity the merchant keeps. If a public rail here becomes cheap, certain and widely used, we will build on it, but we will never pretend to be it.
Instant is not a go-live. Instant is a commercial model.
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.