Users of payment services in any market often weigh the relative risks of different options when conducting financial transactions. In many nascent and emerging markets1 in Africa, people’s daily calculations about payment options revolve around personal and financial safety. The choice of whether cash or digital payments feel safer depends on the salience of different potential harms. They want to know what is riskier; theft from carrying cash or fraud when using digital payments? The relative trust one has in cash versus digital payments may be defined as the ‘trust threshold.’

This calculation is neither rational nor scientific. Rather, it is informed by one’s personal experiences, social networks, and the visceral feeling of security—and it is constantly shifting. For example:

When users hear about or experience fake or worn-out currency, violent robbery, street theft, loss of cash due to disasters or the danger of loss when sending physical currency over long distances, fear of cash builds up. When this fear becomes overwhelming, users are more attracted to the benefits of digital money. Security features like PIN, passwords, and biometrics give users confidence in digital forms of currency.

Fraudulent agents, SIM swap fraud, phishing, fake receipts, identity theft, system downtime, and more can lead to devastating impacts, including losing large sums of money. In the aftermath of such experiences, many users feel at a loss for recourse or remedy, and they return to the tangible comfort of cash.

In the demand-side study we conducted for our annual State of Inclusive Instant Payment Systems Africa 2025 report, we also saw how media can shape the perception of digital payments. In Angola, Côte d’Ivoire, Madagascar, and Tunisia, awareness campaigns and information about digital payments on television and radio, print, social media and networks have played a significant role in the pace of digital adoption.

In each country, unique social and economic realities shape the perspectives and preferences of both micro, small, and mid-sized enterprises (MSMEs) and individuals, with varying impacts on users’ trust thresholds. Let’s look at the country profiles from a cash and digital risk perspective, and strategies that may encourage digital payment adoption.

In Côte d’Ivoire, a highly competitive and mature mobile money market, most people have already crossed the initial threshold from cash to digital. While consumer confidence in digital payments is high, consumer behavior with individual providers is capricious. If users experience a wave of agent fraud in one network or if information about a system outage goes viral, people may flock to a competitor perceived as more stable. In a mature yet fickle market, users do not retreat to cash, but rather to a ‘safer’ digital option.

In a highly digital market like Cote d’Ivoire, the challenge is not in spurring adoption, but in implementing fool-proof strategies to manage sophisticated fraud tactics and maintain trust amidst intense competition. Joint efforts between digital payment providers and regulators can aid in this. For example, since fraud protection and security benefit the entire ecosystem, payment providers can come together to invest in systems that detect fraudulent transactions such as using AI in real time and flag them before they are completed. They can also create a safe and compliant industry-wide database of fraudulent accounts to prevent crossbreeding of fraudulent activities.

In Angola, where bank-led models are more dominant, digital behavior is defined by the demographic. Frequently earning, urban, banked populations see digital as the default means of payment. However, for informal traders, infrequent earners, and rural consumers, trust in digital payments is tenuous. These users fear not just digital fraud, but the formal system itself, perceiving it as unreliable, unavailable, and even exclusionary. Confirmation bias drives user decisions. For example, a new user in the informal economy may view a digital fraud incident as the ultimate confirmation of their fears: that the formal system is unstable, inconvenient, opaque, insecure, and designed to exploit them. This word spreads very quickly through social networks. As this happens, the fallback to cash may not just be a temporary or isolated measure; it can reinforce a pre-existing choice to remain outside the formal digital ecosystem.

Providers, both bank and mobile money, should therefore emphasize trust-building strategies, including embedding reliable security features, developing consumer education on the advantages and benefits of digital payments (including security measures), ensuring system availability, and investing in a wider distribution network to promote access and education. Agents can play a key role in educating users, building their confidence, and accelerating their shift from cash to digital.

The market in Madagascar features limited formal infrastructure, compounded by a challenging geography and vast rural populations. The fear of physical harm is paramount due to the dangers associated with carrying physical cash for trade and sending money to family over long distances. For many Malagasy users, both MSMEs and consumers, such scenarios can create a powerful, sustained push towards digital use.

Although mobile money providers have invested a lot in a large agent network across the country, rural reach remains a challenge, and cash still dominates smaller transactions and in-store purchases. With a large proportion of the population still underserved, the initial trust balance for adopting digital payments, though fragile, is crossed more readily because the alternative is so perilous. Since users rely heavily on agent networks, issues like a lack of liquidity, poor service, errors in transactions, or agent-related scams can quickly erode trust. Such issues can quickly lead to a fallback to traditional and socially vetted—though risky—cash-based networks like sending money through a trusted bus driver or relative.

To build trust from the ground up digital payment providers can take a three-pronged approach: (1) increasing agent education to make them more professional by certifying them on security, customer service and liquidity compliance; (2) deploying grassroots consumer education like face-to-face demos and low-literacy aids to explain safety and identify scams; and (3) offering extremely simple user interfaces and verification steps that prevent users from sending money to the wrong recipient or paying the wrong merchant.

Other quick wins include funding national financial literacy campaigns delivered in local languages and guaranteeing network connectivity in deep remote areas across the country to ensure system reliability.

A middle-income market with a higher degree of urbanization than the other countries in this study, Tunisia is unique in that cash use is dominant, and the perceived risk of physical theft of cash is relatively less acute. Hence, the inertia of cash is stronger than the initial ‘push’ to digital payments. Some evidence from the SIIPS 2025 study shows that the perceived risk of digital fraud, however small, can act as a significant barrier to digital payment adoption for both MSMEs and consumers. For digital adoption to accelerate, providers must rely on more than just the security argument. Indeed, they could also promote features such as the convenience of digital payments over cash, a flawless user experience, and low-cost transactions.

Digital payment providers’ focus should be on building ‘platforms on steroids’ from the outset – having no tolerance for failure by ensuring near-100% uptime and instant transaction speeds, built on value and featuring loyalty programs, discounts, and seamless payments across value chains that offer a superior experience versus cash. Further, a robust customer support system must be set up to resolve issues quickly and conclusively.

The lessons from these four countries illustrate that the journey toward digital payments is not a uniform march to technology, but a nuanced negotiation with human psychology, the most important being trust. The analysis of the four countries further reveals that the ‘trust threshold’ is calibrated differently everywhere

Ultimately, success in scaling digital payments solutions will belong, not to those who sprint ahead with the latest technologies, but to those who most effectively diagnose and solve the dominant, localized fears of the people they serve, proving that digital payments offer more value than cash.