The question most payroll systems don’t ask

Most payroll software starts from the same assumption: your workers have bank accounts. Enter the account number, run the transfer, done.

That assumption breaks down fast in Africa’s construction and blue-collar sectors.

World Bank and ILO data indicates that hundreds of millions of blue-collar workers across Africa do not hold a traditional bank account [2]. The World Economic Forum puts the broader unbanked adult population on the continent at somewhere between 350 million and 400 million people, roughly 40 to 50 percent of all adults [1]. These are not marginal figures. They describe a majority or near-majority of the workforce in many countries where construction and infrastructure projects are actively hiring. The ILO estimates that more than 85 percent of employment in Sub-Saharan Africa is informal [4], which means most of those workers sit outside the payroll and banking systems that standard HR software assumes.

So when a contractor needs to pay 200 site workers on Friday, and most of them have no bank account, what actually happens?

What usually happens is not good

In practice, many employers fall back on cash. A supervisor drives to the bank, withdraws a large sum, and distributes it on-site. Workers carry their wages home. Some of it gets lost, stolen, or spent before it reaches the household. There is no record for the worker, and only a rough one for the employer. Disputes are common and hard to resolve.

The other common option is just making workers wait. Delays in informal payroll are so normalized in some sectors that workers budget for them. That is its own kind of cost.

Neither approach is sustainable as projects scale and compliance expectations tighten.

The KYC problem makes it harder

Mobile money changed the picture significantly. Services like M-Pesa in East Africa showed that you do not need a bank account to send and receive money reliably. A SIM card and a registered mobile wallet can substitute for much of what a bank account does for everyday transactions. Sub-Saharan Africa now accounts for the majority of mobile money accounts globally, with the GSMA reporting over 835 million registered accounts across the region as of its most recent State of the Industry report [5]. That scale matters: it means the disbursement infrastructure exists, even where bank branches do not.

But mobile money is not frictionless either. Registration requires identity verification, and here the problem compounds. According to data from Mobi, approximately 105 million unbanked adults in Sub-Saharan Africa lack the formal government ID required to clear basic KYC validation hurdles [3]. No national ID, no verified wallet. No verified wallet, no digital payment.

Financial inclusion, as a concept, sounds straightforward. In practice it keeps running into this wall: the systems built to bring people in still require documents that a large share of the population does not have.

What a payroll platform needs to handle

For frontlineworkforce technology to actually work in this environment, it has to be built around these realities, not around the assumption that they will eventually resolve themselves.

That means a few things in practice. The platform needs to support mobile money disbursement natively, not as an afterthought. It needs workflows that can accommodate workers at different stages of identity documentation, so that KYC gaps do not simply become payment gaps. It needs records that the worker can access and keep, because for many people in Africa’s informal economy, a payment history from an employer may be the closest thing they have to a financial identity.

Earned wage access adds another layer. If a worker can draw against wages already earned before payday, they are less likely to take high-interest short-term loans to cover an emergency. Research from the Brookings Institution found that workers with access to earned wage programs were significantly less likely to resort to high-cost credit products to bridge short-term cash gaps. That is a concrete financial wellness outcome, and it does not require a bank account to deliver it.

The infrastructure question is real, not rhetorical

Employers sizing up platforms for managing their frontline workers sometimes treat the unbanked question as a detail to sort out later. It is not a detail. It is the central operational challenge of paying blue-collar workers across much of the continent.

Fixa is built to handle payroll and earned wage access in exactly this context: workers without traditional bank accounts, mobile money as the primary disbursement channel, and identity documentation that does not always conform to what legacy financial systems expect.

The question of how you pay workers without a bank account has an answer. It just requires infrastructure that was designed for the actual workforce, not an idealized one.

Sources

[1] World Economic Forum, via source material provided — approximate range 350M–400M unbanked adults, ~40–50% of African adult population

[2] World Bank / ILO, via source material provided — hundreds of millions of blue-collar workers in Africa lack traditional bank accounts

[3] Mobi, via source material provided — approximately 105 million unbanked adults in Sub-Saharan Africa lack formal government ID required for KYC validation

[4] ILO, Women and Men in the Informal Economy: A Statistical Picture — https://www.ilo.org/global/publications/books/WCMS_626831/lang--en/index.htm

[5] GSMA, State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money 2023 — https://www.gsma.com/sotir/