Algeria

Licensing, Authorisation & Market Access

The Bank of Algeria authorised Djezzy Payment Services, a subsidiary of Optimum Telecom Algérie, to incorporate as a payment service provider on 23 September 2026. This is reported as the first such incorporation authorisation under the payment-institution framework established by Règlement n°25-02 of 14 April 2025 and detailed by Instruction n°06-2025 of 17 August 2025, which sets out general conditions for PSP constitution and agrément across 36 articles, including payment-account and ring-fenced (cantonnement) account requirements for customer funds, and obligations on PSPs to preserve and archive identification and traceability data.

The September authorisation is an incorporation authorisation, understood to sit prior to a final operating licence: Djezzy Payment Services is expected to apply for a full agrément within a defined window following the authorisation, and the authorisation would lapse if that application is not made within it. No confirmation is available of whether that application has yet been submitted.

Alongside the market-access step, the Bank of Algeria has moved to standardise the reporting obligations that apply once an entity is authorised. Instruction n°11-26 of 7 October 2026 requires banks, financial establishments and PSPs to produce periodic accounting statements under a common nomenclature, applying Article 8 of Règlement n°25-07 of 24 July 2025 on the chart of accounts. A further instruction, reported around 6 October 2026, requires the same set of entities — banks, financial establishments and PSPs — to identify and codify a defined set of regulatory attributes describing the characteristics of their executed operations and counterparties, such as residency status and currency, enabling more granular analytical reporting back to the regulator.

Read together, these three instruments describe a licensing perimeter that is no longer purely statutory: a named non-bank entrant has cleared an incorporation gate, and the accounting and attribute-reporting infrastructure that any authorised PSP will need to comply with is being built out in parallel, on the same basis as applies to banks.

Outlook

The operative question is whether Djezzy Payment Services converts its incorporation authorisation into a full agrément within the applicable window; that step, not the September authorisation itself, would mark Algeria's first live non-bank payment service provider. The accounting and attribute-codification instructions will also start producing a standardised reporting trail for PSPs that did not previously have an equivalent obligation, which should make the composition and activity of the licensed PSP population more visible in subsequent cycles.

Licensing, Authorisation & Market Access

The Bank of Algeria granted preliminary, non-bank PSP authorisation to Djezzy Payment Services on 23 September 2026, operating under the non-bank PSP framework created by the 2023 Monetary and Banking Law. This is a market-access development of first-order significance for Algeria's payments landscape: it establishes a working example of the licensing pathway through which a non-bank entity can secure authorisation to provide payment services, distinct from the country's traditionally bank-led payments architecture. Djezzy now has twelve months from the date of preliminary authorisation to complete its final PSP licensing application with the Bank of Algeria.

Bank of Algeria Instruction 06-2025 is the operative regulatory instrument underpinning this authorisation, imposing capital requirements, wallet-tier structures and fund-segregation rules on PSPs. The fund-segregation requirement in particular establishes a safeguarding mechanism distinguishing customer funds from the PSP's own operational capital, a structural feature relevant to assessing counterparty risk for any entity transacting through a newly authorised non-bank PSP in this market. The bank-versus-non-bank distinction is squarely at the centre of this development: Djezzy's authorisation is explicitly a non-bank PI/EMI-style pathway rather than a banking licence, and Instruction 06-2025's tiered wallet and segregation rules appear calibrated specifically to that non-bank category rather than applying uniformly across both bank and non-bank PSP types.

Outlook

The key item to watch is whether Djezzy Payment Services completes its final PSP licensing application within the twelve-month window, which closes around 23 September 2027. A successful completion would establish the first full end-to-end precedent for the non-bank PSP licensing pathway under the 2023 Monetary and Banking Law framework, potentially opening the door for further non-bank market entrants to pursue the same route.

Licensing, Authorisation & Market Access

Algeria's payment-services licensing landscape moved materially this cycle with Bank of Algeria Instruction 06-2025, which establishes the country's first tiered fintech rulebook. The instruction creates a three-tier digital-wallet structure and sets a minimum capital requirement of 160 million DZD for payment service providers, marking a shift toward a structured, tiered licensing framework distinct from the existing bank-licensing regime. This detail rests on a single Tier-4 secondary source this cycle, and no primary Bank of Algeria text for the instruction has been retrieved, so the precise tier boundaries and capital-requirement scope remain provisional pending confirmation.

The existing PSP approval process, evidenced independently at Tier-3 confidence, requires dual authorisation: applications must clear the Monetary and Banking Council before receiving final sign-off from the Governor of the Bank of Algeria. This dual-authorisation structure predates Instruction 06-2025 and continues to govern market access for new payment service providers seeking approval outside or alongside the new tiered wallet regime. A regulatory sandbox is separately reported to be targeted for 2026, planned to admit at least twenty innovators annually, which would represent Algeria's first formal fintech-innovation admission mechanism, though this too rests on the same single Tier-4 source as the wallet-tier detail.

The bank-PSP versus non-bank payment-institution distinction is material here: the tiered wallet regime and its capital requirement appear targeted specifically at non-bank PSPs and e-money issuers, layered on top of the separate dual-authorisation process that continues to govern licensing generally. This creates two parallel tracks for market entry depending on institutional type, though the interaction between the tracks is not yet clarified by available sourcing.

Outlook

The key open question is whether Instruction 06-2025 will be published in a form retrievable at primary-source level, which would allow independent verification of the tier structure, the 160 million DZD capital figure, and the sandbox admission target. Watch for the first sandbox cohort announcement in 2026 as a concrete test of whether the innovation-admission mechanism functions as reported.

Licensing, Authorisation & Market Access

Bank of Algeria Instruction No. 06-2025 establishes Algeria's first formal payment-service-provider licensing category, covering digital wallets and agent networks, with a minimum capital requirement of DZD 160 million. This is a genuinely new market-access route: prior to this instruction, Algeria had no dedicated licensing framework for nonbank payment institutions, meaning digital-wallet and agent-network activity operated, if at all, outside a bespoke authorisation regime. The capital requirement sets a meaningful barrier to entry — DZD 160 million is a non-trivial threshold — which should be read as the regulator calibrating the new category toward institutional-grade entrants rather than a low-barrier fintech sandbox category, at least at first instance.

A structurally important feature of this licensing category is that it is explicitly nonbank-PI/EMI in character: the instruction creates a distinct authorisation lane for payment institutions and e-money issuers separate from the bank-licensing regime, marking Algeria's first real bank-versus-nonbank regulatory bifurcation in payments. This distinction matters because it determines which prudential and conduct obligations attach to which class of entrant, and it signals that Algeria's regulator has moved from a bank-centric payments model toward one that formally accommodates nonbank players.

Separately, a draft Law on Money and Credit is under legislative consideration that would expand the powers of the CMC (the Monetary and Credit Council) over banks and payment and settlement systems, and would introduce a Bank-of-Algeria-issued digital dinar. However, the current legislative stage of this draft law is genuinely unclear across the sources available this cycle — some reporting suggests partial adoption as early as 2023, while other coverage still describes it as pending — and this ambiguity should be treated as a primary-source verification gap rather than resolved in either direction.

Outlook

A regulatory sandbox for fintech innovators is targeted for a 2026 launch, expected to admit at least 20 fintech participants annually, though this sits at the proposed stage with only uncertain confidence. The clearest near-term signal to watch is whether the sandbox launches on schedule and whether the draft Law on Money and Credit's legislative status is clarified via a primary Algerian government source.

Conduct, Safeguarding & Financial Promotions

The conduct and safeguarding backbone of Algeria's new PSP regime rests on two pillars introduced by Bank of Algeria Instruction No. 06-2025: a tiered KYC and wallet-limit structure, and a mandatory fund-segregation requirement. The tiering is granular — Level 1 permits transactions up to roughly $740 with only basic identification, Level 2 raises the ceiling to roughly $3,700 but requires proof of income alongside official identification, and Level 3 permits up to roughly $7,400 but requires video-interview verification. This graduated structure is a conventional risk-based approach to onboarding friction, calibrating verification intensity to transaction-value exposure.

The mandatory fund-segregation requirement is the safeguarding mechanism proper: licensed PSPs are required to segregate customer funds, which is the standard consumer-protection mechanism against a PSP's own insolvency or misuse of customer balances. Taken together with the KYC tiering, this represents Algeria's first substantive conduct-and-safeguarding framework for nonbank payment institutions — prior to this instruction there was no comparable regime governing how nonbank PSPs must treat customer funds or verify customer identity at scale.

A further structural constraint worth noting under this module is the dinar-only, national-territory-only operating requirement also imposed by the same instruction: PSP services must be provided exclusively in Algerian dinars and within Algeria's national territory. This has the practical effect of excluding crypto and stablecoin integration from the conduct framework entirely, a boundary that applies uniformly to the new nonbank PI/EMI licensing category rather than being a bank-specific carve-out.

Outlook

The key open question for this module is how the tiered KYC and segregation requirements are actually supervised and enforced in practice once PSPs begin operating under the new licence category — the structure exists on paper as of this cycle, but operational enforcement intensity is not yet observable from the sources available.

Payment Corridor Dynamics

Bank of Algeria joined the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System in August 2025, connecting Algeria to intra-African local-currency settlement infrastructure spanning more than 150 banks. PAPSS membership is a supranational-layer development that reduces Algeria's reliance on intermediary hard currencies — typically the US dollar or euro — for settling intra-African trade, since PAPSS enables direct local-currency settlement between participating central banks rather than routing through a third-currency correspondent chain.

This membership supports Algeria's broader integration objectives under the African Continental Free Trade Area, since a functioning local-currency settlement corridor is a practical precondition for the kind of intra-African trade volume growth that AfCFTA aims to unlock. From a corridor-dynamics perspective, this represents a genuinely new settlement pathway for Algeria's cross-border trade-related payment flows, distinct from and complementary to the domestic PSP-licensing and instant-payment developments occurring at the national level this cycle.

Outlook

The key development to watch is the pace and volume of actual settlement activity flowing through the PAPSS corridor now that Algeria has joined, which would indicate whether membership translates into a meaningful shift in how Algeria's intra-African trade payments are actually settled, as opposed to remaining a structural membership with limited transaction volume.

Product Innovation & Market Development

The Bank of Algeria published an updated compendium of authorised banking products and services, dated 14 May 2026, issued under Article 7 of Regulation No. 2020-01. The update adds a deferred-debit CIB card to the list of products that Algerian banks are authorised to offer under the CIB card scheme. This is a Tier-3-sourced, incremental but concrete product-authorisation development, expanding the card-product instrument set available within the domestic scheme rather than introducing a new payment rail or instrument category.

This product update sits within the same regulatory-publication cadence as Instruction 06-2025's tiered digital-wallet regime, though the two are distinct instruments addressing different product categories — cards under the existing Regulation 2020-01 compendium mechanism, versus digital wallets under the new tiered fintech rulebook. The deferred-debit card addition suggests continued incremental modernisation of the card-product suite alongside the more structural fintech-licensing reform occurring in parallel.

Outlook

Watch for further additions to the authorised-products compendium as a recurring, lower-materiality but useful indicator of incremental product modernisation in the Algerian banking sector, distinct from the higher-materiality tiered-licensing reform tracked separately.

Product Innovation & Market Development

Algeria's digital-payments market showed substantial growth momentum this cycle: digital transactions surged 71 percent in Q1 2024, and the EDAHABIA prepaid card base more than doubled to 14.3 million by end-2024. This growth is occurring against a backdrop of a 57 percent adult unbanked rate, meaning the market development signal here reflects both genuine acceleration in digital-payments adoption and a substantial remaining addressable population that has not yet been brought into any formal payment rail, whether card-based, wallet-based, or account-based.

This growth context is the backdrop against which Algeria's National Fintech Strategy 2024-2030 and the new PSP licensing regime under Instruction 06-2025 are being introduced, suggesting the regulatory changes described elsewhere this cycle are a deliberate policy response to, and enabler of, an already-accelerating underlying adoption trend rather than a purely top-down regulatory initiative disconnected from market reality.

Outlook

The item to watch is whether digital-transaction growth and EDAHABIA card-base expansion continue at a comparable pace through 2025-2026, and whether the new PSP licensing category under Instruction 06-2025 meaningfully accelerates further adoption among the remaining unbanked population, which is the National Fintech Strategy's implicit target segment.

Commercial Intelligence & Fintech

Named regional fintech players — Banxy, DFA, ESREF Pay, and Yassir — are reported to be operating in or adjacent to the Algerian payments market, though confidence in the precise scope, scale, and commercial terms of this activity is only uncertain this cycle. Unlike the structural regulatory developments covered elsewhere in this brief, these are discrete commercial-presence signals rather than confirmed transaction, funding, or product-launch events with disclosed detail; no amount-disclosed commercial event (such as a specific funding round or M&A transaction) was identified for Algeria this cycle.

The emergence of named regional fintech activity in or adjacent to Algeria is consistent with, and plausibly a response to, the broader market-development signal recorded elsewhere this cycle — the 71 percent Q1 2024 digital-transaction surge and the new PSP licensing category under Instruction 06-2025 together create a more hospitable environment for regional fintech entrants than existed previously, though the sourcing available this cycle does not permit a confident causal claim connecting these players' presence directly to the regulatory changes.

Outlook

The item to watch is whether any of the named regional fintech players formalise their Algerian market presence through a disclosed licensing application under the new PSP category, a funding round, or a specific product launch with disclosed terms — any of which would upgrade this cycle's uncertain commercial-presence signal into a confirmed, disclosed commercial event.