Sending money into Sub-Saharan Africa has long carried some of the highest fees of any remittance corridor in the world. According to World Bank data, average costs on these routes have historically sat well above the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal target of 3%, with some corridors charging 8-10% per transfer once hidden FX margins are included.
Where the cost actually comes from
Most of that cost is not the wire fee you see at checkout. It is the spread baked into the exchange rate, the correspondent banking fees layered between sender and receiver, and the manual reconciliation required when a transfer touches three or four different financial institutions before it lands.
What is changing
Mobile money penetration, regional payment switches, and direct API integrations with local banks and wallets are starting to compress that chain. Instead of a transfer hopping through multiple correspondent banks, modern platforms can settle directly into a mobile wallet or bank account - cutting both cost and delivery time dramatically.
This is exactly the gap MaliSwap is built to close: a direct, two-way bridge between the GCC and Africa that skips the legacy correspondent banking stack entirely.