Wave, BCEAO and the unfinished business of interoperability

When Wave undercut Orange Money in 2021, the conventional reading was that competition had finally arrived in francophone West Africa. The deeper story is that the BCEAO permitted a non-bank operator to settle in CFA francs without forcing it through the legacy correspondent rail. That decision, more than any tariff, is why Senegal-Côte d'Ivoire transfers now cost under 1%.

The illusion of choice

Yet five years on, a diaspora sender in Paris still cannot push euros directly into a Wave wallet without routing through a licensed money transfer operator. The wallet sits inside the monetary system; the on-ramp does not. This is not a technology gap — it is a regulatory choice that protects incumbent MTO margins.

“Interoperability is not a feature you ship. It is a permission the central bank grants — or withholds.”

What the digital franc should actually fix

The BCEAO's ongoing CBDC pilot is framed as modernisation. It should instead be framed as unbundling: separating the unit of account from the rails that move it. Until a regulated euro-zone PSP can settle directly into a BCEAO-supervised wallet, every announcement about 'reducing remittance costs' will remain rhetoric.