MTN's second effort at offering mobile money (MoMo) in South Africa seems to be paying off. MTN tried and failed in its first mobile money effort in South Africa, canceling the service in 2016 after four years. It relaunched the ZA service in January of this year.
According to the company's most recent earnings report, MTN has 40 million MoMo subscribers in total, including one million in South Africa.
Enter Ozow to make MTN's MoMo more robust. MTN has tapped the South Africa-based payments platform to offer an instant EFT payment option for USSD users. This allows these users to deposit funds directly from their bank to their MoMo Wallet.
Ozow founder Thomas Pays told ITWeb that this deal is all about financial inclusion and marks another step toward a cashless economy.
“We see this partnership as one more step in our efforts at displacing cash and enabling greater digital and financial inclusion for all South Africans. The rapid growth of mobile money services this year points to the growing demand among South Africans for safe and efficient ways to store, send, and spend money via their mobile device."
In another mobile money development, Safaricom and a number of Kenyan banks are appealing to the Central Bank for relief from the zero-rating policy on mobile money transactions below KSh 1,000. The policy was designed as a pandemic relief measure for consumers.
According to TechNext, the policy has costs Safaricom, operator of the M-Pesa mobile money service, as well as Kenyan banks dearly. For example, Kenyan Central Bank's profits dropped by 43.1% during the nine months ending 30 September.
The zero-rating fallout is bad news for banks snd telecoms in the short term. Longer-term it adds to the signals pointing to something we are predicting at BigFive Digital. Eventually, Africa will go cashless. It's a matter of which country goes first, and when. The timeline is difficult to predict. But one certainty is that the pandemic has shortened it.