You sell phones in Nairobi. Your supplier is in Shenzhen and wants to be paid in yuan.
So your bank turns your shillings into dollars. Then someone turns those dollars into yuan. Each step has a spread, and you pay both.
Shillings to dollars. Dollars to yuan.
That is still how most of Africa’s trade with China settles, though China now accounts for about 20% of the continent’s external trade, up from 5% 2 decades ago, according to Afreximbank.
On 10th October 2026, 1 of Africa’s biggest banks was due to sign in China to change that.
The rails
Ecobank operates in 34 African countries. Its chief executive, Jeremy Awori, told Reuters the bank would join CIPS, China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System, which clears payments in yuan and links more than 5,000 banks in over 100 countries and territories. It is also in talks with Bank of China on a joint yuan settlement service.
“China is building its own payment and settlement rails that could make it almost instantaneous.”
Jeremy Awori, CEO of Ecobank
Ecobank would not be the first. Standard Bank connected to CIPS last November, the first African lender to do so, and cleared about $500 million in its first 4 months. Last month it won authorization from ICBC to clear yuan across the continent.
Bank of Kigali signed on as a direct participant in Xiamen on September 8. China supplied 26.7% of Rwanda’s imports in the first quarter. Banco de Fomento Angola is preparing to follow.
“The transactions we have seen have been primarily driven by import and export activities between China and Africa.”
Ives Yang, Standard Bank
The pull
The banks are following the trade. China-Africa trade grew nearly 18% last year, by Chinese customs data, and since May 1 China has charged no tariff on imports from 53 African countries.
Governments moved first. Kenya converted 3 Chinese railway loans from dollars to yuan, cutting about $215 million a year in interest, according to Reuters.
Now it reaches the farm. In 2022, Kenyan exporters shipped 10 to 20 containers of avocados a week to China. Today it is about 200.
“When you export to them, you are paid in yuan.”
Muda Yusuf, CEO of Nigeria’s Centre for the Promotion of Private Enterprise
The gap
Fintechs reached the importer first. Since September, Nigeria’s Grey lets a trader send between 50 and 21,000 yuan to a bank account in China for a flat $2.80. Verto and XTransfer sell versions of the same promise to small businesses: the supplier gets yuan, and the buyer never has to hold any.
Look 1 layer down, though. Grey’s yuan payouts are funded from dollar, euro, pound or stablecoin balances. The yuan arrives. The dollar is still upstream.
That layer is what the banks are now rebuilding, and it leaves a seam a founder can work.
In the same city sit 2 businesses that never meet. An exporter is paid in yuan for avocados and has to sell it. An importer needs yuan for phones and has to buy it. Today both trade through the dollar, and each pays a spread to get there.
A bank on CIPS can hold and clear yuan at home. What it does not have is the small-business layer on top: the matching, the invoicing, the treasury that lets 1 firm’s yuan pay another firm’s supplier without the detour. Built on a licensed bank’s rails, that is a product someone can start on now.
None of this dethrones the dollar. The Federal Reserve estimates the dollar is in about 58% of international transactions. The yuan is in about 2% of cross-border payments.
58%. 2%.
But a trader in Nairobi does not pay the world’s average. They pay for their own route.
Shillings to dollars. Dollars to yuan.
The rails for shillings to yuan are going in this year. Whoever builds the counter in front of them gets the trader.
