Cash still dominates everyday payments in South Africa, making it a challenging market for MoMo, MTN’s mobile-money and digital financial services platform. But as the country overhauls its payments infrastructure and opens the market to more competition, the company sees a chance to change how South Africans pay.
MTN wants MoMo to become a broader financial and transactional platform, linking consumers and merchants to payments, credit, remittances and other digital services across its African footprint. South Africa will serve as an important test of whether the mobile-money model that worked in less banked markets can be adapted to a more mature financial system.
MTN believes the answer lies not in competing with banks on basic transactions, but in using the country’s evolving payments infrastructure to build a broader digital financial platform for consumers and merchants. The strategy includes leveraging new payment infrastructure, pursuing new licences as they become available, and expanding into lending and other financial services.
MTN also sees an opportunity among consumers and businesses that continue to rely heavily on cash, as well as smaller merchants that have historically had limited access to financial services. “The national payments infrastructure is moving very fast. This is infrastructure that we want to leverage to penetrate the market,” MTN Group Fintech chief executive officer (CEO) Serigne Dioum said at the company’s Fintech Summit in Johannesburg on Tuesday.
But South Africa is only one part of the strategy. MTN says MoMo now has more than 70 million monthly active users across 14 markets and processed more than 13 billion transactions worth over $330 billion in the first half of 2026. Its ecosystem includes more than 2.3 million merchants and one million agents, while international remittances exceeded $3 billion during the period. “We started by giving customers access to financial services. Now we