MTN Group is moving to turn its African mobile-money empire into something much bigger than a payments business, as the telecoms giant prepares to separate its fintech operations in Nigeria and Uganda, bring in strategic investors, and push into lending across some of the continent’s most underbanked markets.
The Johannesburg-based company is finalising the structural separation of its Nigerian and Ugandan fintech units, a key step required to complete a minority investment deal with Mastercard and open the door to other strategic buyers.
The move places MTN at the centre of one of Africa’s biggest financial-services battles: who will control the next generation of payments, credit, remittances and merchant services on a continent where hundreds of millions of people still rely heavily on cash.
MTN Group CEO Ralph Mupita told investors at the company’s capital markets day that the process is delicate because the company wants to avoid losing value while carving fintech assets out of its telecoms structure.
“The separations are complex as we have to minimise value leakage,” Mupita said.
