Local payment collection has long been one of the least glamorous but most consequential problems in African airline distribution. Airlines that want to sell directly to passengers in Lagos, Nairobi, Accra, or Cairo have historically faced a version of the same obstacle: a different payment partner, a different regulatory environment, and a different settlement timeline in every market. The operational overhead has been enough to push many international carriers toward indirect distribution rather than building out the local payment infrastructure needed to sell direct.
That calculus is shifting. On June 12, Lagos-based payments infrastructure company Kora announced it had joined the IATA Financial Gateway, known as IFG, connecting global airlines to Africa’s payment ecosystem through a single integration.
The IATA Financial Gateway is the airline industry’s dedicated payment orchestration and management platform. It brings together global, regional, and local payment partners to give airlines the right mix of payment options to maximize acceptance, reduce cost, and better serve customers across every market they operate in. It is not a consumer product. It is the infrastructure layer that sits between an airline’s ticketing systems and the payment methods their passengers actually use.
Through the integration, airlines and travel agencies using IFG can now accept payments across Africa via Kora, covering cards, bank transfers, mobile money, and local alternative payment methods, without having to build or manage multiple complex integrations independently. One connection through IFG gives airlines access to Kora’s full African payment infrastructure, with the settlement reliability and local compliance that enterprise operations require.
IATA currently represents over 370 international airlines globally. With Kora now part of IFG, every one of those carriers has a cleaner path to accepting local payment methods across Africa without a separate integration project in each market.
Kamil Al-Awadhi, IATA’s Regional Vice President for Africa and the Middle East, said Kora’s participation strengthens the association’s ability to serve airlines operating in or expanding across African markets.
Dickson Nsofor, CEO of Kora, was direct about the strategic intent behind the partnership. “Africa is not a market to figure out later,” he said. “It is a growth opportunity that demands serious infrastructure today. Our partnership with IATA signals that the rails are ready. Global airlines no longer have to choose between expanding into Africa and managing payment complexity. With Kora inside IFG, they get both.”
The significance of that last point should not be understated. Settlement reliability in Africa has historically been invisible friction in airline distribution. An airline can sell a ticket, confirm a booking, and still face delays or failures at the settlement layer that create reconciliation problems downstream. Building that reliability at scale, with local compliance embedded across markets, is not a trivial achievement.
The payments layer and the distribution layer in airline retailing are more connected than they are often treated separately. An airline’s willingness to invest in direct selling, expand NDC-capable storefronts, and grow its African footprint is shaped in part by confidence in what happens after a booking is confirmed. If settlement is fragmented or unreliable, the commercial case for direct distribution weakens. Kora’s entry into IFG does not resolve every structural challenge in African airline distribution on its own, but it removes one of the most cited barriers to international carriers taking African markets more seriously.
Africa is one of the fastest-growing aviation markets in the world, expected to add more than 300 million new passengers by 2050. The carriers that build direct distribution and payment infrastructure on the continent now are not just solving a current operational problem. They are positioning for a market that is still arriving.
