Lead Signal
Cameroon's baseline regulatory capture this cycle is anchored by a materially tightening payments licensing regime. Cameroon's payments licensing regime is set at the CEMAC regional level, restricting payment-service provision to three authorised categories — credit institutions, microfinance institutions and licensed payment institutions — with a 500 million CFA minimum capital requirement for payment institutions; a 28 February 2024 Ministry of Finance decision extended that regime to cover electronic and interoperable payment platforms via a Qualified Electronic Service Provider licence. From August 2025 the Ministry of Finance began enforcing Article 84 of the underlying CEMAC regulation, requiring fintech operators — mobile money, digital lending, crowdfunding and payment processors — to hold formal payment-institution licences or face market suspension; Wave complied via an 11 June 2025 bank-partnership route with Commercial Bank Cameroon, excluding e-money issuance, which remains separately licensed. Effective 1 January 2026, COBAC raised the minimum capital requirement for a credit-institution licence to 4 billion FCFA, a significant new barrier to entry for smaller fintechs seeking bank-tier status, while COSUMAF certification is separately required for investment-based crowdfunding and robo-advisory platforms. Read together, these three moves show a regulator closing gaps in its own 2018 framework rather than introducing a wholly new regime, and they are pushing non-bank providers toward bank-partnership routes of the kind Wave used as the practical pathway into a market that is otherwise becoming harder to enter on a standalone licence.
Other Developments
Cameroon's digital-money posture continues to combine institutional prohibition with sovereign experimentation. BEAC enforces exclusive use of the CFA franc and bans financial institutions from engaging with cryptocurrencies, and COBAC bars institutions from facilitating crypto transactions and requires reporting of such activity. No specific national law governs individual cryptocurrency use, however, leaving a regulatory vacuum for retail users that sits alongside the institutional ban. BEAC Governor Yvon Sana Bangui has confirmed the central bank favours a sovereign digital currency pegged 1:1 to the CFA franc over dollar-backed private stablecoins, working with the IMF on a sub-regional framework, and in February 2026 held a capacity-building workshop with COBAC and COSUMAF toward a harmonised crypto-asset regulatory framework expected later in 2026. Separately, a general digital-asset regulation has existed since May 2023 empowering COSUMAF to approve Digital Asset Service Providers, but COSUMAF had issued no operational approvals as of early 2026, leaving a supervisory vacuum in which platforms such as Ejara continue to operate.
On infrastructure, the ISO 20022 payment-messaging standard became compulsory for CEMAC financial institutions from 22 November 2025, coordinated through CORENOFI, even as IMF staff have urged BEAC to resolve outstanding technical issues delaying its own Treasury Single Account IT platform, still non-operational in pilot countries Cameroon and Gabon. On the scheme side, GIMAC and Visa signed a memorandum of understanding on 2 April 2026 to integrate Visa technology into the GIMACPAY platform, targeting government payments and e-commerce digitalisation — a converging-collaboration signal rather than pure competitive displacement of Visa and Mastercard's existing dominance.
Corridor concentration remains stark: Cameroon accounts for 62.11% of registered CEMAC mobile-money accounts, 63.58% of transaction volume and 76.57% of transaction value, with TerraPay reporting over 90% of its ECCAS-region inflows originating there, even as informal channels are estimated to carry 35-75% of registered flows amid BEAC's foreign-exchange surrender and repatriation rules. Domestically, MTN Mobile Money and Orange Money together still account for more than 80% of electronic transactions, but new entrants — Camtel's Blue Money, Wave, and diaspora-focused Cauri Money's "Gajo Money" — are reshaping market structure following the 2022 failure of Société Générale's bank-backed YUP. On the legal side, Cameroon remains under FATF increased monitoring as of October 2025, and long-running BICEC embezzlement litigation, stemming from an estimated FCfa 50 billion loss exposed by a COBAC audit, continues to work through Cameroonian courts.
Cross-Monitor Connections
Two items in this cycle sit at the WPM/FIM boundary rather than within WPM's own remit. Cameroon's continued FATF grey-list status and the 2023 GABAC mutual evaluation's findings on weak DNFBP supervision and beneficial-ownership transparency are flagged for dedicated illicit-finance analysis at FIM, since Sentinel.gi's live feed was not directly retrievable this research pass and the W11 position here is carried from public FATF/GABAC sourcing pending reconciliation. Separately, the gap between COSUMAF's dormant Digital Asset Service Provider regime and the continued operation of crypto-adjacent platforms is flagged to FIM as a potential illicit-finance exposure question that sits outside WPM's regulatory-tracking scope.
Outlook
Two forward-dated items will shape the next several cycles. A harmonised CEMAC crypto-asset regulatory framework, following the February 2026 BEAC-COBAC-COSUMAF workshop, is expected to be published later in 2026, and would be the first concrete resolution of the multi-year gap between COSUMAF's unimplemented 2023 DASP regime and the region's growing digital-asset activity. Further out, the AfricaNenda-GIMAC merchant-payment interoperability pilot, which entered an implementation phase in July 2025 testing a QR-code system and its economic and complaints-handling rules, is targeting universal instant-payment access across CEMAC by 2030. Nearer-term, Cameroon's Law N°2024/017 on personal data protection reaches its compliance deadline in June 2026, requiring fintechs to appoint a Data Protection Officer and meet encryption and 72-hour breach-notification standards — a compliance load arriving on top of, not instead of, the licensing and capital tightening already under way.