The companies have not publicly identified all eight countries by name, but PawaPay's existing network covers 20 African markets, including Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, among others. Through a single API connection, PawaPay handles processing, settlement, foreign exchange conversion, and reconciliation on Deriv's behalf, interfacing with local mobile money operators so Deriv does not need to negotiate separate agreements with individual telecoms.

Since the partnership launched in 2025, PawaPay says it has recorded a measurable increase in mobile money transaction volumes for Deriv, fewer failed transactions, and more predictable settlement cycles. The companies have also run coordinated user education campaigns in the covered markets. PawaPay currently processes more than 4 million transactions daily across 42 mobile money operators, maintains a claimed uptime of 99.9%, and says its network reaches roughly 85% of Africa's mobile money wallets.

"Mobile money is already deeply embedded in how people transact across Africa," said Nikolai Barnwell, PawaPay's CEO. "The real challenge for companies expanding across multiple markets is running it reliably once volumes grow." Derek Swift, Head of Client Funding Facilities at Deriv, pointed to the same concern from the platform side: "Our partnership with PawaPay has been central to Deriv's expansion across Africa. Their platform has proven reliable in markets where volatility is a real operational risk."

Why the Deposit Rail Matters

The structural issue this partnership addresses is straightforward. Africa holds approximately 1.1 billion registered mobile money accounts, representing 53% of the global total, according to GSMA's 2025 State of the Industry report. Africa also accounted for roughly 75% of all global mobile money transactions in 2024, totaling more than $1.1 trillion in value, a 15% increase from the prior year. In Kenya alone, mobile money penetration reached 86.6% as of March 2025, according to Kenya's Communications Authority. Approximately 300 million African adults still lack access to formal financial services. For that population, a mobile wallet is the primary financial instrument. Without a mobile money deposit option, platforms like Deriv effectively cannot reach them.

Deriv, founded in 1999, offers more than 300 financial instruments including forex, contracts for difference (CFDs), binary options, and synthetic indices. Synthetic indices are instruments that simulate market conditions and trade around the clock. In markets with limited local exchange access or significant currency instability, that kind of instrument serves a practical purpose. Nigeria's naira depreciation drove a spike in on-chain crypto activity to roughly $25 billion in March 2025 alone, according to Chainalysis data. Analysts note that the same demand for dollar-denominated exposure that pushes Nigerian users toward crypto also drives interest in forex and synthetic trading products.

Sub-Saharan Africa received approximately $205 billion in on-chain crypto value between July 2024 and June 2025, a 52% increase year over year, ranking it third globally for crypto growth behind Asia-Pacific and Latin America, according to Chainalysis's 2025 Geography of Cryptocurrency Report. Retail-sized transfers (under $10,000) accounted for more than 8% of regional volume, compared to a 6% global average, which suggests a higher proportion of individual, non-institutional activity. That profile of user, active in small-value digital finance, likely overlaps with Deriv's target market and with the demographic PawaPay's infrastructure is designed to serve.

Regulatory Exposure Worth Noting

One detail relevant to readers in Nigeria and Kenya: Deriv holds no country-level regulatory licenses in Africa. The platform operates under authorizations from the Malta Financial Services Authority, Labuan FSA in Malaysia, the Vanuatu Financial Services Commission, and the BVI Financial Services Commission. Deriv does not hold licenses from Nigeria's Securities and Exchange Commission or Kenya's Capital Markets Authority. Nigeria's Investments and Securities Act, signed into law in March 2025, now formally classifies digital assets as securities. Kenya passed a Virtual Asset Service Providers Bill in 2025. How these evolving frameworks apply to international platforms offering CFDs and synthetic instruments is still being worked out, and users in those markets should factor that into their assessment.

Barnwell has previously identified regulatory uncertainty as one of the central operational risks facing mobile payment providers in Africa. Routing through a payments aggregator like PawaPay, rather than engaging telecoms directly, reduces the complexity of negotiating separate agreements with individual mobile operators. That aggregator model does not, however, reduce a foreign platform's exposure to host-country securities or digital asset classification laws of the kind Nigeria and Kenya have recently enacted.

What Comes Next

PawaPay and Deriv have both indicated the partnership is designed to expand into additional markets over time. For Web3 developers and crypto platforms targeting African retail users, the same deposit-rail problem Deriv solved here applies equally to stablecoin on-ramps, decentralized exchange front-ends, and remittance applications. PawaPay's API is available to third-party developers, and its aggregator model covers 42 mobile money operators across 20 markets through a single integration point. Competing options in the space include Flutterwave, Paystack (owned by Stripe), and MFS Africa, each with different geographic coverage.

Africa's mobile money market is projected to grow at a compound annual rate of 18.32% through 2033, according to Market Data Forecast. The infrastructure layer underneath that growth is becoming a meaningful battleground for global fintech and trading platforms.