• MTN processed 11.1B MoMo transactions worth $212.2 in H1 2025, a 45.4% rise in value, with 63.2M active wallets.
• The fintech arm’s carve-out is advancing, with 99.9% of MTN Uganda shareholders approving separation on July 22, 2025.
• MTN aims to build a pan-African “super app,” competing with B2B players like Flutterwave and disruptors such as Chipper Cash.

MTN Group is advancing the structural separation of its fintech business, moving closer to a standalone vehicle for mobile money and adjacent services. In Uganda, shareholders approved the carve-out of MTN Mobile Money (U) Limited at an extraordinary general meeting on July 22, 2025, with 99.9% in favour, clearing a key market step in the wider programme.

The engine underneath kept accelerating through the first half. MTN processed 11.1 billion mobile-money transactions valued at US$212.2 billion in H1 2025; transaction value rose 45.4% year over year and volumes 14.5%. Monthly active MoMo wallets reached 63.2 million, up 1.8% from a year earlier. Group EBITDA climbed 42.3% in constant currency to R46.7 billion.

Merchants held steady at 2.0 million with a 0.9% sequential lift in Q2 as MTN prioritised point-of-sale reliability for QR and tap-to-pay. Advanced services—lending, cross-border payments, and other “BankTech” plays—expanded 42.0%, adding 3.8 percentage points to reach 33.4% of MoMo revenue. Partnerships are widening rails and acceptance. A multi-market deal with Mastercard spans 13 countries, adding virtual and physical cards linked to MoMo wallets and enabling use online, at the point of sale, and ATMs—an on-ramp to card ecosystems for cash-heavy markets.

Management says separation “continues to progress,” part of a broader push to “unlock value” while the group raises its medium-term service-revenue guidance. The company points to improved macro stability in key markets and cost and capex execution as the backdrop. When the carve-out completes, MTN’s fintech platform will operate across 14 MoMo markets in the group footprint, running at an annualised transaction-value rate of roughly US$424 billion based on H1 2025. “One of Africa’s largest” is defensible; “largest” needs peer comparisons.

Strategic Context: The Shape of Africa’s Fintech Race

MTN’s fintech strategy is a grand-scale effort to convert its vast telecommunications footprint into a dominant, pan-African financial ecosystem. The approach mirrors that of Safaricom’s M-Pesa in Kenya, but with a critical difference. Where M-Pesa has achieved extraordinary penetration by embedding itself into the daily economic fabric of one market, MTN is betting on geographic breadth—leveraging its 280 million subscribers across more than 16 countries. By legally separating its fintech arm, MTN is aiming for the agility and valuation profile of a tech company, with ambitions to develop a “super app” offering payments, credit, insurance, and more in one interface.

This consumer-facing (B2C) model stands in sharp contrast to the infrastructure-led strategies of players like Flutterwave and Interswitch. These “pure fintechs” operate on a B2B basis, providing payment gateways, APIs, and the “digital rails” that underpin the entire system. MTN, by contrast, is building a branded, vertically integrated ecosystem—a walled garden anchored by its MoMo wallets and merchant network.

But the competitive terrain is also shaped by a third camp: agile, venture-backed disruptors such as Chipper Cash. These startups “unbundle” financial services, focusing on excelling in a single vertical like low-cost cross-border remittances. Their edge lies in speed, pricing, and user experience, capturing the attention of younger, digitally native customers. For MTN, this sets up a strategic contest between its all-in-one ecosystem and niche specialists that chip away at profitable slices of the value chain.

Idriss Linge