Banking Through an Agent Outside Khartoum: What Is Allowed and What Is Not (2026)

Why so much of Sudan is now banked without a branch

For a large share of Sudanese households, the nearest working bank branch is no longer in the same town, and for some it is no longer in the same state. Reporting on the war's effect on the banking sector describes more than a hundred branches ransacked across Khartoum and the states, and coverage of the sector's recovery has put the asset losses at more than USD 20 billion. The Central Bank of Sudan itself now lists Port Sudan among the places you can reach it in person.

That picture is slowly changing. Through 2026 several banks announced reopenings: Blue Nile Mashreg at Al Sajana in late April, Bank of Khartoum at Al-Rumaila and Al-Mahatta Al-Wusta in Omdurman along with its corporate branch at Al-Riyadh, and Al Baraka at Al-Ammarat with a stated plan to restore further damaged branches in Khartoum State and the other states. But "a branch has reopened somewhere" is not the same thing as "you can reach one".

This is the gap banking agents are meant to fill: a shop, fuel station, pharmacy or trader acting for a licensed bank, so that depositing and withdrawing cash does not require a journey. If your problem is choosing which bank to be with in the first place, that is a different decision and we have covered it separately in how to choose a bank when your branch is unreachable. This article is about the agent standing between you and your money once you have chosen.

What the 2026 banking agency rules actually permit

The Central Bank issued a Regulation for Licensing the Practice of Banking Agency Services in 2026. It is worth understanding as a customer, because it draws a hard line around what the person in front of you is entitled to do.

Reporting on the regulation describes the permitted services as cash deposits, cash withdrawals and bill payments, plus a supporting role: introducing new customers to the bank, and helping people use services they are unfamiliar with.

That is the list. It is deliberately narrow, and the narrowness is the protection. An agent is a counter, not a banker.

The things an agent may never do

The same reporting sets out explicit prohibitions. A banking agent may not:

• open an account for you — account opening stays with the bank
• grant financing, or give you a cash advance
• carry out any assessment tied to opening an account or approving financing, so an agent cannot "pre-approve" you for anything
• deal in foreign currency
• deposit or cash cheques
• use the agency for their own personal benefit

Read that list again as a fraud filter, because that is what it is. An "agent" who offers to open your account on the spot, hand you a small advance until payday, change dollars for you, or cash a cheque is either not an agent at all, or is an agent acting outside the terms of their appointment. Either way, the transaction is not one the bank has authorised, and you would be relying on the individual rather than the institution.

The same applies to anyone who tells you they can arrange financing informally. If you are borrowing, that happens through the bank under a named Islamic contract, whether a murabaha, a musharaka or an ijara, and the mechanics of those are set out in Islamic banking basics for Sudan. No agent has authority to originate any of them.

Who is allowed to be an agent

The regulation also filters who may hold an agency. Reporting on it describes two disqualifying conditions in particular: a criminal record involving fraud, dishonesty, lack of integrity or other financial offences, and a record of credit default in the applicant's credit report in the twelve months before the agency contract is signed.

On the bank's side, an institution that wants to work through agents must apply to the Central Bank for approval rather than simply appointing whoever it likes, and must monitor the arrangement for operational, liquidity, strategic and compliance risk, along with money-laundering and terrorist-financing risk.

For you, that produces one practical test. A legitimate agent exists because a specific licensed bank asked the Central Bank for permission to appoint them. So the agent should be able to name their bank without hesitating, and that bank should be one you can verify. Verifying a bank or lender is a five-minute job, and the method is set out in how to check a bank or lender is licensed in Sudan.

The licensed wallets, from the Central Bank's own register

Agents are one route to cash. Mobile wallets are the other, and here the Central Bank publishes something genuinely useful: a public register of licensed financial technology companies, showing the licensing category, the licence number and the consumer brand name.

As published, that register lists mobile payment institutions (category FIMP) including MTN Sudan Fintech trading as MoMo (licence 2022/FIMP/1), SudanPay Digital as SudanPay (2024/FIMP/1), Hypernova as Cashi (2024/FIMP/2), Istinara M.A.T as Bravo (2025/FIMP/1), Al Raffia Alzrga as Zikher (2025/FIMP/2), Sudani Fintech as SAH (2025/FIMP/3), Zain Fintech as Bede (2025/FIMP/4) and Nil Pay Technologies as Nil Pay (2025/FIMP/5). It also lists financial switch operators (category FSO): SPD Co. Digital (2022/FSO/1), Bright Technologies (2024/FSO/1) and ALASGAD Digital and Smart Solutions (2026/FSO/1).

Two things follow from that list, and both matter more than the names themselves.

First, the licence numbers carry their year. A brand licensed in 2025 is new, and being new is not a defect, but it does mean you should not assume the agent network, the customer support or the dispute handling behind it is as settled as an older institution's.

Second, a licence is not coverage. The register proves the Central Bank has licensed the company. It does not promise the brand has a working cash-out point in your town, or that the service was up this morning. Those are separate questions, and you should ask them locally before you make one wallet your only route to money.

Bank-owned apps sit alongside these. Bank of Khartoum's Bankak remains the dominant one by a wide margin, and what it can and cannot do is covered in our explainer on Bankak.

Finding a legitimate cash point near you

The Central Bank's commercial bank locator is the most under-used tool in Sudanese personal finance, largely because most people do not realise how it filters. You can narrow it by city, with Khartoum, Wad Madani, Kosti, Atbara, El Gadarif, Nyala, El Obeid, Dongola and Port Sudan among the options, and by the individual bank across roughly forty institutions.

More usefully for anyone travelling to reach money, it also filters by branch type, with categories that separate a head office from a Nafethah counter, an ATM, a full branch, and locations listed as Tawkelat, the agency category. And it filters by night shift and by whether the location opens on Saturday.

If you are making a trip of any length to reach cash, those last two filters are the ones that decide whether the journey is wasted. Check them before you travel, not after.

The Central Bank publishes its own branches too, with direct telephone numbers: the headquarters and main branch in Khartoum, then Wad Madani in Elgazira, Kosti in White Nile, Atbara in River Nile, El Gadarif, Nyala in South Darfur, El Obeid in North Kordofan, Dongola in Northern State, and Port Sudan in Red Sea State. Those are supervisory offices rather than places to draw your salary, but they are where the regulator can be reached in person.

Bear in mind that any published directory reflects the day it was compiled. In a country where a branch's status can change quickly, telephone before you travel, and treat the listing as a starting point rather than a guarantee.

Before you hand cash to an agent

A short discipline, every time:

1. Ask which bank they act for, and check that bank appears in the Central Bank's locator.
2. Insist on a receipt or an electronic confirmation before you walk away. If the confirmation message has not arrived, you are still standing there, and that is the moment to sort it out rather than tomorrow.
3. Check the amount on the confirmation, not the amount you were told. With prices moving as fast as they have been, a transposed figure is easy to miss and hard to unwind later.
4. Never let an agent keep your PIN, your identification or your phone "to complete the transaction". None of the permitted services require any of those to leave your hand.
5. Do not accept an agent-brokered foreign-currency deal. It sits outside what agents may do. If you genuinely need to hold hard currency, that runs through a foreign-currency account opened at the bank itself, under the bank's own rules.
6. Be wary of an agent who asks you to send to a personal number or a personal account. Money moving to an individual rather than to a merchant or bank account is the single most common shape of agent fraud.

A seventh habit is worth building: use the same agent where you can. A relationship is not a legal protection, but a trader who expects to see you next month behaves differently from one who does not.

The plumbing behind it, and why it is improving

Some of the frustration people experience at an agent or inside an app is not the agent's fault at all. It is the network underneath. Sudan's electronic payments infrastructure is run by Electronic Banking Services (EBS), the Central Bank's technical arm, which operates the clearing house, the national ATM switch and the national SWIFT bureau.

Two developments in 2026 matter here. In June, press reporting said EBS had been accredited as a SWIFT service bureau, described as the first in the country and one of only five across the Middle East and Africa, which bears directly on the correspondent-banking thinness that makes money hard to move into and out of Sudan. And on 10 August 2026 the Central Bank launched a National Payment Switch, with Omdurman National Bank the first institution connected and a stated plan to connect the rest in phases. The Deputy Governor described the objective as restoring and operating the infrastructure of electronic payments, through a sovereign national switch connecting all banks to one system.

The honest reading of "in phases" is that not every bank is on it yet. Until that rollout completes, a transfer between two banks may travel a different road from a transfer inside one bank, and it can behave differently. If your money is time-sensitive, ask your branch whether the receiving bank is connected before you assume same-day.

None of this removes the older constraints. Coverage still depends on telecommunications and on electricity, both of which have failed for extended periods during the war, long enough at one point for online banking applications to be unreachable for close to two weeks. An agent network is more resilient than a single app, because cash in a shop does not need a working data centre. That resilience is a large part of why agents matter, and it is also why treating any one channel as your only channel is a mistake.

When something goes wrong

If a deposit does not appear, a withdrawal is debited but not paid out, or an agent will not produce a receipt, the escalation is the same one that applies to any banking dispute: raise it with the bank first, in writing, and keep everything.

If the bank does not resolve it, the Central Bank has a customer protection section that receives complaints against banks and financial institutions, puts them to the institution concerned, investigates, and reports its decision back to the complainant. It can be reached through an online form, in person, by telephone or by post, and its form asks whether you have already complained to the institution, which tells you the order the regulator expects you to follow. Complaints already before the courts are outside its remit. The full ladder, including what to put in the file, is set out in how banks in Sudan handle a customer dispute.

If the money that went missing had come from relatives abroad, the receiving side has its own specific failure points, covered in how to receive money from abroad in Sudan, and the sender's view of the same journey is in sending money to Sudan. Where you are weighing formal operators against each other, our money transfer comparison is the place to start.

Frequently asked questions

Can a banking agent open an account for me? No. Account opening is explicitly outside what a banking agent is permitted to do under the 2026 regulation, along with granting financing, giving cash advances, and any assessment tied to opening an account or approving finance. An agent may introduce you to the bank and help you understand a service, but the account itself is opened by the bank.

How do I know an agent is real? Ask which bank appointed them, then verify that bank in the Central Bank's commercial bank locator, which also lets you filter for agency locations under its Tawkelat branch type. A genuine agent is appointed by a licensed bank that has applied to the Central Bank for approval to work through agents, so being unable or unwilling to name the bank is itself the answer.

Can an agent change dollars for me? No. Foreign-currency dealing is one of the prohibited activities. If an agent offers it, they are operating outside the terms of any legitimate agency, whatever they tell you about the rate on offer.

Are mobile wallets safer than an agent? They are different, not safer. A wallet depends on network and power; an agent depends on a person and their cash float. The check that applies to both is licensing: mobile payment institutions appear on the Central Bank's licensed fintech register with a licence number, and agents trace back to a licensed bank. Many people outside Khartoum end up using both, precisely because the two fail in different circumstances.

What if I am displaced and my documents are gone? Identification requirements do not disappear, but the position is not hopeless. What matters here is knowing where the problem can and cannot be solved: an agent cannot resolve an identification problem at all, because verifying who you are is part of the account relationship the bank holds, not part of the cash-handling the agent is appointed to do. Take it to the bank, ask specifically what alternative documentation it will accept, and get the answer from someone who can name the policy.

Does an agent charge a fee? Expect one, and ask what it is before the transaction rather than after. Fees are set through each bank's arrangement with its agents rather than by a single published national tariff, so they vary between banks and between locations. An agent who will not state the fee up front is one to walk away from.

Reviewed 27 August 2026. Rules and licences change: confirm the current position with the Central Bank of Sudan (cbos.gov.sd) or directly with your bank before acting on anything here.

This article is general information about how banking agency services work in Sudan. It is not financial advice, and it does not recommend any particular bank, wallet or agent.