MFS Africa announced on Monday (March 29) that it has reached more than 320 million mobile money wallets, which means the Pan-African FinTech leader now covers 60 percent of all such wallets in sub-Saharan Africa.
The company said in a news release that this reach — based on the 2021 Mobile Money State of the Industry Report from the GSMA — gives a range of “banks, telcos, money transfer operations and other financial institutions interoperability at scale in Africa through a single integration point.”
The GSMA report also recognizes MFS Africa’s partnership with Xoom — a PayPal service connecting the African diaspora in Europe, the U.K., Canada and the U.S. with mobile wallets in places like Rwanda, Uganda and Zimbabwe — as one of the key highlights for the industry.
“In 2010, MFS Africa took a bet that mobile money accounts would be the most dominant form of financial accounts in Africa and emerging markets at large,” MFS Africa Founder and CEO Dare Okoudjou said in the release. “The new numbers released by the GSMA have now removed any lingering doubts about that. We also wagered that through our work, these accounts would be able to exchange value with each other and with the rest of the world, in the same way [that] we communicate with each other by mobile phones.”
The news release stated that sub-Saharan Africa is the world’s most developed mobile money market, accounting for approximately two-thirds of worldwide mobile money transactions last year, opening the door for huge opportunities in growth and entrepreneurship.
PYMNTS has touched on this movement before, including a story last year on the “quiet revolution” in cashless payments in Africa, in which Karen Webster spoke to DPO Group CEO Eran Feinstein on the rise of cashless payments during COVID-19. “There are hundreds of millions of consumers in Africa that have not so much as touched a shilling, let alone used one to pay, in over a year,” Feinstein said. “No one calls this eCommerce.”
