African mobile money providers are turning their attention from expanding access to deepening how customers use their services, as executives at the MTN Group Fintech Annual Summit in Johannesburg warned that high adoption numbers mask weak uptake of savings and investment products.
Speaking on the second day of the summit on September 2, Shaibu Haruna, chief executive of Mobile Money Limited Ghana, pushed back against the view that Ghana’s mobile money market has matured simply because usage is high. He said the platform processes more than 26 million transactions daily, but that only a small share of customers save actively on a 30-day basis, while less than 0.3 percent of its user base actively invests.
“I get very uncomfortable when you describe Ghana as a matured market,” Haruna said, adding that the next opportunity for the industry lies in helping customers use existing financial tools more fully rather than simply adding new users.
In Zambia, executives said the challenge is less about product depth and more about consistent service delivery across a widely dispersed population. Komba Malukutila, chief executive of Mobile Money Zambia, said scaling the number of agents was not, on its own, solving customers’ access problems.
“The customer doesn’t care how many agents you have,” Malukutila said. “They care about whether the service is accessible, and whether they’re able to access that liquidity.” MoMo Zambia has responded by deploying artificial intelligence tools to monitor agent activity and liquidity levels across its network, allowing the company to identify locations where customers are struggling to access cash or complete transactions.
Technology dominated much of the discussion at the summit, with delegates pointing to AI, interoperable payment systems, QR payments, open finance and cloud-based infrastructure as tools that could make digital financial services cheaper and easier to use. But speakers cautioned that technology alone would not drive the sector’s next phase of growth, and called for closer collaboration between mobile money operators, banks, regulators, fintechs and payment providers.
“No single financial institution or fintech or one company can build the financial service ecosystem for our people in Africa,” said Serigne Dioum, chief executive of MTN Group Fintech.
The remarks reflect a broader shift in how Africa’s mobile money industry is measuring its own progress, moving beyond transaction volumes and account numbers toward whether customers are able to save consistently, access credit and build longer-term financial resilience.
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