TUNIS — Mobile payment transactions in Tunisia rose 31.5 percent year on year in the first half of 2026, to five million operations worth 914.2 million dinars, an increase of 17.7 percent in value. The figures come from the Central Bank of Tunisia's periodic bulletin "Paiements en chiffres en Tunisie", published this month.

The rest of the file is more sobering. The number of registered mobile wallets reached 218,886, against 207,524 a year earlier — a rise of 5.5 percent. The bank card fleet stood at 6.151 million cards, with 3,427 ATMs and cash dispensers, 45,600 point-of-sale terminals and 1,456 active merchant websites. Transfers remain the leading cleared payment instrument, bills of exchange consolidated second place by value, and cheque usage continued the decline that began in 2025.

Read the two numbers together

A 31.5 percent rise in transactions against a 5.5 percent rise in wallets means the growth is coming from existing users transacting more often, not from new users joining. The average wallet made roughly 23 transactions in six months, at an average value of about 183 dinars. That is the profile of a small, committed user base — not of a payment method entering the mainstream.

The scale is worth stating plainly. Tunisia has a population of around 12 million and 6.15 million bank cards. It has 218,886 mobile wallets. Mobile payments are growing quickly because almost nobody was using them.

The merchant infrastructure explains part of why. There are 1,456 active merchant websites in the entire country and 45,600 point-of-sale terminals, meaning the physical acceptance network is thin outside large retail in the major cities. A consumer who wants to pay electronically frequently cannot, and cash and cheques persist not out of preference but because acceptance is missing at the counter.

What the cheque decline actually shows

The retreat of the cheque is often presented as evidence of digitalisation. It is at least as much a consequence of the 2024 reform of cheque law, which tightened issuing conditions and criminal exposure — a change that pushed businesses towards bills of exchange rather than towards cards or wallets. Business News noted that bills of exchange have consolidated second place by value. Substitution between two paper instruments is not the same thing as a shift to electronic payment, and conflating the two flatters the digitalisation record.

Set against the government's own programme, the gap is visible. A restricted ministerial council on 15 August reviewed 114 digital projects under way and announced the imminent launch of the "Khadamet" application, which will offer more than 40 administrative services with electronic payment through bank cards, postal cards and e-wallets. Those services will be paid for through the rails these figures describe. If wallet adoption grows at 5.5 percent a year, the payment layer will constrain the service layer.

What has been proposed

Operators and the central bank have both pointed to specific levers, and they are not novel. Interoperability between mobile-money schemes and bank accounts — so that a wallet is not confined to one issuer's ecosystem — is the measure that most accelerated adoption in Morocco and in East African markets, and remains partial in Tunisia. Reducing merchant discount rates and terminal costs for small traders addresses the acceptance gap directly, since the binding constraint is the shopkeeper's margin, not the consumer's willingness. And instant account-to-account transfer at low or no cost, of the kind deployed in Brazil and the euro area, tends to displace both cash and cheques faster than card schemes do.

The central bank publishes these figures every quarter, which is itself a useful discipline: the trajectory is measurable. On current numbers, electronic payment in Tunisia is growing at an impressive rate and from a base low enough that the rate is not yet the point.