Visa Turns Prepaid Cards Into Credit Rails Across Africa

Visa is betting that the fastest way to extend credit in emerging markets is to stop treating it as a separate product. The card network, credit infrastructure platform _able, and pan-African payments network Onafriq announced on August 20 that they are expanding Visa Flex Credential across Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa, a partnership that lets banks and fintechs attach a credit line directly to a debit or prepaid card a customer already carries.

The mechanics matter more than the announcement suggests. Visa Flex Credential is not a new card product; it is a rail issuers layer onto cards already in circulation, so a customer who has only used a prepaid or debit card can draw credit through the same plastic, without a new application or onboarding flow. _able supplies the underwriting behind live deployments in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Mozambique and Zambia, and Onafriq brings distribution across the wider CEMEA region.

For issuers in markets where card penetration far outpaces credit access, that distinction is the whole business case. “Most consumers across this region already hold a card, and very few can access credit through it. Visa Flex Credential turns that gap into a channel,” said Jad Abbas, co-founder and CFO of _able. Godfrey Sullivan, Visa’s senior vice president and head of products and solutions for CEMEA, framed it as ecosystem-building, and Christian Bwakira, Onafriq’s group chief commercial officer, said the goal is making borders matter less across African payments.

The original insight: this is the same logic now showing up in how card networks are governing AI agents that transact on a person’s behalf, standardizing on rails that already exist rather than building new ones. It is the same speed advantage that let HSBC and Standard Chartered settle a live transaction on shared ledger infrastructure instead of building a private one first. In CEMEA, distribution, not appetite, has been the binding constraint on credit access, and this partnership bets on distribution over invention.

Source: Onafriq