Tanzania's Instant Payment System, better known as TIPS, is one of the clearest examples in East Africa of a central bank building shared payments infrastructure itself, rather than leaving operational access to be negotiated between individual banks and mobile money providers. The Bank of Tanzania started working on TIPS in 2018, and the system went live in 2021 with a pilot covering three banks and two non-bank providers, five participants.
Participation has widened steadily since then. The number of connected providers grew from the original five at launch to 34 by the end of 2022 and reached 47 by the end of 2025, spanning the country's banks and mobile money operators. That expansion in the number of institutions connected to the same real-time rails is one of the clearest reasons the transaction volumes have been able to scale as quickly as they have.
How Fast Usage Has Grown
The volume moving through TIPS has risen sharply. In 2025, the system handled 644 million transactions, up 42% on the year before. The value of those transactions grew even faster, up 84% to almost TZS 55 trillion. In 2024, the system handled 452.5 million transactions worth TZS 29.8 trillion, so both measures have moved sharply in a single year. The Bank links part of that shift to revised charges for retail bank-to-bank transfers introduced in May 2024, after which TIPS volumes for those transfers rose 56%. The steeper rise in value relative to transaction count is consistent with larger and more routine payments migrating onto the shared infrastructure as more providers and use cases, including government bill payments, have been brought online.
"Those growth rates tell you people are actually changing how they pay, not just testing a new option," said Ivaylo Bozoukov, a payments industry executive who tracks instant payment systems across several markets. "When transaction value grows faster than transaction count, it usually means larger and more routine payments are moving onto the system, not just small transfers."
The Bank of Tanzania attributes this growth to a combination of factors: wider interoperability between participating providers, the integration of government bill payments into TIPS in 2025, lower retail payment fees, and rising mobile use. Bringing government payments onto the same rails as ordinary transfers has the practical effect of increasing the everyday usefulness of the system for both citizens and the institutions that serve them. The central bank says the system's round-the-clock real-time settlement, convenience and low cost have together encouraged the move away from cash, and that TIPS has significantly reduced the cost of digital transactions for Tanzanians.
Opening the System to Money From Abroad
A significant expansion came in 2025, when TIPS opened to receive money sent from abroad. Funds sent this way can be paid directly into a local bank account or a mobile wallet, without needing a separate cash collection step.
The Bank of Tanzania has established a standard fee of TZS 1,000 per transfer for this specific route, paid by the sending institution to the receiving one. The stated aim, according to the bank, is to make it cheaper for Tanzania's diaspora to send remittances home, folding money into the same instant infrastructure that domestic payments already use rather than routing them through a separate, more expensive channel.
"Linking remittances into a domestic instant payment system is not something every country has managed to do well," Ivo Bozukov said. "Tanzania setting a standard fee for that specific route, rather than leaving it to be negotiated transaction by transaction, is a practical way to keep the cost predictable for both sides."
What Comes Next
The Bank of Tanzania is implementing a third phase of TIPS, which aims to expand the system's use cases beyond its current scope. The direction, adding functionality to an already-connected network rather than building parallel systems, is consistent with how TIPS has developed so far.
"The value of a system like this compounds as more is built on top of it," Ivaylo Bozoukov said. "Every additional use case that runs over the same rails makes the existing connections more valuable for providers and for the customers on either end of a transaction."
What Being Connected Means for Wallet Providers
For a mobile wallet operating in Tanzania, connection to TIPS means reaching customers of every other bank and wallet on the network, including money now arriving from overseas. That reach gives customers a quicker and more affordable way to pay and be paid than routing transactions outside the shared system would allow, sparing smaller providers the cost of negotiating separate bilateral connections with every other institution on TIPS.
As TIPS moves into its next phase of development, its trajectory so far offers a working example of what a centrally built instant payment system can achieve: rapid transaction growth, broadening participation, and the recent extension into cross-border remittances. It was designed from the outset to include both banks and non-bank providers on comparable terms.
