Liberia’s Instant Payments Lesson for SA AI Commerce

Liberia shipped a national instant payments rail in 73 business days. Most retailers I speak to in South Africa can’t get a basic payments “improvement” out the door in 73 days—because their stack is tangled, their data is fragmented, and every change depends on five vendors.

That’s why the Central Bank of Liberia’s new Inclusive Instant Payments System (IIPS)—built on Mojaloop—is worth paying attention to, even if you run an e-commerce store in Johannesburg or a digital service in Cape Town. Real-time, interoperable payments are infrastructure. And in e-commerce, infrastructure dictates conversion rates, customer support load, fraud exposure, and how well your AI can actually perform.

This post is part of our series on how AI is powering e-commerce and digital services in South Africa. The through-line is simple: AI makes experiences smarter, but only if the underlying systems are fast, connected, and trustworthy. Liberia’s IIPS shows what “connected” looks like at a national level—and it’s a blueprint South African businesses can borrow from, even without being a bank.

What Liberia actually launched (and why it matters)

Liberia launched IIPS, a real-time interoperable payments platform powered by Mojaloop (open-source payments infrastructure). The initial practical win is immediate: mobile money transfers between two major mobile network operators—Lone Star Cell MTN and Orange Liberia—can now work through a shared rail, rather than living in separate walled gardens.

The numbers in the announcement are the real story:

• 52% account ownership by 2024 (World Bank Global Findex 2024), surpassing a national target.
• Over 11 million mobile wallets driving that growth.
• 73 business days to deploy the first Government-to-Person (G2P) use case.
• 111 days to deliver Person-to-Person (P2P) capability.
• Salary processing that took seven days is positioned to happen in seconds.

If you’re in South African e-commerce, you might think “nice for them, but we already have cards, EFT, and wallets.” The point isn’t that SA lacks payment options. The point is that interoperability and real-time rails reduce friction across an entire economy—and friction is the silent killer of online checkout performance.

Instant payments and AI are two sides of the same customer promise

Answer first: Real-time payments and AI both reduce “time-to-value” for customers; together they shrink abandonment, increase trust, and make personalization feel relevant rather than creepy.

Here’s how they map to each other in practice.

The checkout moment: where AI wins or loses

AI can optimize product recommendations, build smarter bundles, personalize offers, and predict churn. But the checkout moment is still brutally simple:

• Can the customer pay right now?
• Does it work on their device and preferred channel?
• Do they trust the flow?

When payments are interoperable and fast, you can confidently use AI to:

• Trigger real-time incentives (e.g., apply an instant discount only if the customer completes payment within 3 minutes).
• Run dynamic risk checks without adding extra steps (approve, step-up, or decline in milliseconds).
• Personalize payment methods (show the top 2 methods most likely to succeed for this customer, on this device, at this time).

If payment confirmation is delayed, fragmented, or unreliable, AI gets forced into guesswork. Your model can predict “high intent,” but the payment rail turns it into “support ticket.”

Service delivery: instant settlement enables instant fulfilment

Liberia’s IIPS emphasizes that processes that used to take days can happen in seconds. In commerce, that translates to a very specific shift:

• Digital goods: deliver immediately after confirmed payment.
• Bookings/services: auto-confirm with no manual reconciliation.
• Subscriptions: reduce failed payments and churn with smarter retries and channel switching.

AI thrives in environments where it can act—not just “recommend.” Instant payments create more moments where automation is safe.

Interoperability is the hidden growth lever (especially in Africa)

Answer first: Interoperability expands your addressable market without forcing customers to change behavior.

One quote from the Liberia rollout lands hard: limited interoperability meant many citizens carried two phones to transact—one per network. That’s not a “payments” issue; it’s an economic participation issue.

In South Africa, we see a softer version of the same problem:

• Customers bounce between cards, wallets, bank transfers, and buy-now-pay-later.
• Merchants integrate multiple gateways, each with different reporting and dispute processes.
• Finance teams reconcile across channels with spreadsheets.

The result is predictable: data fragmentation.

And AI can’t outperform fragmentation. If your transaction data lives in five systems, your “AI customer engagement” becomes shallow:

• A customer who pays via EFT looks like a different person from the same customer paying by card.
• Refund reasons don’t map cleanly to payment events.
• Chargebacks can’t be linked to product, campaign, and fulfilment signals quickly enough.

Liberia’s approach—build a shared rail that connects providers—shows the direction of travel: fewer islands, more shared standards.

Open-source infrastructure and AI: the same democratizing pattern

Mojaloop is open source, and that matters. Not because open source is “nice,” but because it changes who gets to build.

In AI for South African e-commerce, we’re seeing the same pattern:

• Smaller retailers can use models and tooling that used to require a data science department.
• Teams can experiment quickly, then harden what works.
• Vendors compete on implementation quality rather than locking customers into proprietary rails.

The Liberia deployment also highlights something I wish more businesses would internalize: speed is a feature. A 73-day deployment isn’t just “fast”—it’s a signal that the architecture is designed for reuse and repeatability.

What South African e-commerce teams can copy (without being a bank)

Answer first: Treat payments, identity, and messaging as shared “rails” in your own business, then let AI sit on top.

You don’t need a central bank mandate to apply the lesson. You need discipline about architecture.

1) Build a “single view of transactions” before you build fancy AI

If you want AI to improve customer engagement, start here:

• Standardize transaction events (authorized, settled, failed, refunded, charged back).
• Assign a unified customer identifier across channels.
• Capture reason codes and context (device, channel, basket, delivery method).

This is the difference between:

• “Our AI suggests products” and
• “Our AI knows which payments succeed for this segment, which refunds are preventable, and which customers are at risk of churn.”

2) Use AI to reduce payment friction, not add it

A lot of “AI checkout optimization” is just extra popups and confusion.

Better uses:

• Smart routing: pick the gateway/rail with the best success rate for that bank or region.
• Adaptive step-up: only ask for extra verification when risk is high.
• Retry intelligence: if a debit order fails, retry when salary payments typically land (timing differs by employer segment).

The principle Liberia is leaning into is reliability at the system level. Your version is reliability at the checkout level.

3) Make G2P thinking useful: automate your own “mass payouts”

Liberia prioritized Government-to-Person because it’s high volume and high impact. South African businesses have their own payout equivalents:

• Marketplace seller payouts
• Gig worker payments
• Refunds and returns
• Cashback and loyalty redemptions

If payouts are slow, customers contact support. If payouts are instant and trackable, your support load drops.

AI can help by:

• Predicting refund risk and proactively messaging customers.
• Detecting payout fraud patterns early.
• Auto-classifying disputes and routing them to the right team.

4) Design for partnerships, not one-off integrations

Liberia’s launch is a public-private collaboration: central bank leadership with implementation partners and ecosystem participants.

South African e-commerce scaling works the same way. If your integrations are bespoke and brittle, every partner adds months. If you build around:

• clean APIs,
• consistent data contracts,
• and observable event streams,

…you can onboard new payment methods, couriers, and customer engagement tools quickly—and your AI has consistent signals to learn from.

The practical “people also ask” questions (answered plainly)

Will instant payments reduce fraud?

They reduce some fraud by shrinking the window for interception and manual handling, but they can increase other risks if onboarding and monitoring are weak. The win comes from pairing real-time rails with real-time risk scoring and monitoring.

Is open-source payments infrastructure safe?

Open source can be very safe when it’s professionally implemented, audited, and operated with strong governance. The risk is rarely the license; it’s poor operational controls, weak identity checks, and inadequate monitoring.

What’s the link between payments infrastructure and AI in e-commerce?

AI needs consistent, timely signals. Payments are one of the most important signals you have. Faster, more interoperable payments produce cleaner data and enable more automation.

What to do next (if you sell online in South Africa)

Liberia’s IIPS launch is a reminder that digital transformation is less about flashy features and more about dependable rails. If your payments are slow to reconcile, your customer data is fractured, and your support team is constantly explaining delays, your AI efforts will feel like decoration.

Here’s the next-step checklist I recommend:

1. Map your payment journey end-to-end (initiation → confirmation → settlement → refund/chargeback).
2. Quantify friction with numbers you can act on: payment failure rate by method, time-to-confirm, refund cycle time, support tickets per 1,000 orders.
3. Centralize transaction events into one analytics layer your AI can use.
4. Pilot one AI use case tied to money (smart routing, adaptive verification, or payout automation) and measure impact in weeks, not quarters.

This series is about how AI is powering e-commerce and digital services in South Africa—but the real theme is bigger: Africa is building the digital infrastructure that makes smart experiences possible. Liberia moved fast by prioritizing interoperability and standards. If South African businesses match that mindset inside their own stacks, AI stops being a side project and starts driving measurable revenue.

What’s the slowest, most failure-prone step in your checkout or payout flow right now—and what would change if it happened in seconds?