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MTN is betting big on a new set of banking licences and a partnership with China’s AliPay to boost its financial technology (fintech) business in Nigeria and buck the slow take-up of its fintech offerings in its biggest markets.Over the years, MTN’s MoMo (mobile money) platform has struggled to gain traction at home in South Africa and in Nigeria, its biggest operation.Of 90-million customers in the West African nation, the platform closed 2025 with just 3.7-million active wallets, far lower than its target of 30-million to 40-million. In South Africa, 2-million customers of a total 40-million use the platform.South Africa’s high banking penetration is widely accepted as the reason for the platform’s slow adoption locally.MTN Nigeria CEO Karl Toriola detailed factors holding back the business there and emphasised his belief that the new partnership with Chinese fintech giant AliPay and shifting attitudes by Nigerian authorities bode well for the group’s new strategy. “The markets where we’ve done exceedingly well with our financial services we entered as a greenfield operation [started from scratch]. We started in Ghana in 2009,” Toriola told Business Day. “There was really no digital solution, even on USSD. And we captured all of the opportunity, growing gradually over time.”USSD, or unstructured supplementary service data, enables a user to interact with their mobile network or service providers by dialling short codes preceded by an asterisk and ending with a hash without requiring an internet connection.“We got our licence in Nigeria at a point where it was a very advanced market. Between us and South Africa, these are the most advanced markets [on the continent],” Toriola said.“We’ve had instant switching between financial institutions in Nigeria for 15 years, with transfers from MoMo to Access Bank taking half a second. You don’t even see that in most Western countries today.“And so we entered into this space with very high penetration of digital services, highly digital-native banking services outside of the rural areas and very aggressive traditional banks and financial services companies like [Nigerian fintech company] Moniepoint.”In Toriola’s view, MTN entered the Nigerian fintech market in 2019 “with three different weights tied to our legs”.One was the platform. “It wasn’t fit for purpose for that kind of market. That’s been fixed through the [AliPay] announcement, with a lot of work going into that deal.”Second was the licensing. The Central Bank of Nigeria has been cautious about granting full mobile money operator licences to telcom providers, preferring the payment service bank model that restricts the range of services that companies like MTN can offer.“MoMo PSB was deliberately designed — influenced by the traditional Nigerian banks — to hamper and hamstring us. We pretty much had a wallet that could do P2P [peer-to-peer] transfer and not much else,” Toriola said. “Now the philosophy of the central bank has changed where they say ‘come one, come all. Any licence you want we’ll give you as long as you’re compliant with all the fiduciary and governance regulations’,” he said. “So we’re going to build on that and get all the licensing that we need to provide a holistic bouquet of services.”Finally, there is the matter of skills.“In this hypercompetitive digitised market, there’s a certain set of skills that we need which are different from those we used to build up,” Toriola said. “Our other markets have developed those as they’ve gone along.”
