MTN remittance flows hit $3.4 billion, signalling new phase in Africa’s fintech race

MTN Group, Africa’s largest mobile network operator, processed $3.4 billion in remittances in the first nine months of 2025, a 13% jump from $3 billion in the same period of 2024. This move signals the mobile carrier’s aggressive push to challenge agile fintech rivals for a larger slice of Africa’s cross-border payment market.

The Johannesburg-based wireless carrier, which boasts 300 million subscribers, attributed the surge to direct partnerships with top money transfer operators and joint marketing campaigns. The performance validates the company’s strategy to leverage its massive user base against venture-backed challengers like Moniepoint, Afriex, Lemfi, and Kuda, which have aggressively targeted the continent’s diaspora flows.

The volume growth follows Mastercard Inc.’s 2023 acquisition of a minority stake in MTN’s fintech arm, a deal that valued the unit at $5.2 billion. That partnership is now operational, allowing MTN to bundle virtual and physical companion cards with its MoMo wallets, granting users access to Mastercard’s global acceptance network of over 100 million locations.

However, the growth was not without friction. In its financial update for the third quarter 2025, the company noted that remittance inflows in Ghana—a key market—were “channelled to alternative routes,” a signal that the battle for flow is intensifying even as the overall pie grows.

“We will continue to introduce new and innovative products into the market to accelerate growth,” the company stated in the report.

The stakes are high. Sub-Saharan Africa processes approximately $2 billion in daily transactions, yet over 90% of payments remain cash-based. With only 43% of the continent’s 1.3 billion people banked, the race is on to digitise these flows. MTN is betting that its infrastructure advantage will enable it to outlast pure-play fintechs in a saturated remittance space, where regulatory hurdles and liquidity costs often erode margins.

For MTN, the 13% rise from $3 billion in the previous year is a critical metric as it seeks to transform its fintech arm from a value-added service into a standalone revenue engine capable of offsetting slowing voice growth and establishing data.