MTN wants MoMo to crack South Africa’s cash-heavy payments market

Mobile money platform MoMo, owned by South African telecom giant MTN, is aiming to transform South Africa's cash-centric payments market. As the nation modernizes its payments infrastructure and allows greater competition, MTN sees an opportunity to innovate and expand MoMo's services. The company envisions MoMo evolving into a comprehensive financial platform, offering consumers and merchants access to payments, credit, remittances, and other digital services across MTN's African operations.

South Africa will serve as a crucial test for the mobile-money model in a more developed financial landscape.

MTN aims to differentiate itself from traditional banks by leveraging its evolving payments infrastructure to create a broader digital financial ecosystem. This approach includes pursuing new licenses as they become available and expanding into lending and other financial services. MTN also recognizes an opportunity among cash-dependent consumers and smaller merchants who have historically faced limited access to financial services.

MTN Group Fintech CEO Serigne Dioum emphasized the rapid development of South Africa's national payments infrastructure, stating that the company intends to leverage this infrastructure to penetrate the market. MoMo currently boasts over 70 million monthly active users across 14 markets and has processed more than 13 billion transactions worth over $330 billion in the first half of 2026.

The platform's ecosystem comprises more than 2.3 million merchants and one million agents, with international remittances exceeding $3 billion during the same period.

To enhance MoMo's offerings, MTN is developing an open Application Programming Interface (API) that enables partners to integrate their services into its ecosystem. The company already collaborates with banks, utilities, merchants, and other businesses across its markets. MTN Group Chairman Mcebisi Jonas highlighted Africa's digital economy's growing dependence on connecting markets, enabling cross-border payments, supporting regional trade, and allowing seamless participation across borders.

While expanding into lending, remittances, merchant payments, and other financial services, MTN will face increasing regulatory requirements for delivering these services and protecting customer money and data. The South African Reserve Bank is moving towards an activity-based regulatory model, which would give companies like MTN more scope to compete in payments while maintaining essential consumer protection, funds safeguarding, and operational resilience requirements.