Pan-African telecom major MTN aims to offer more retail banking services in its biggest market, Nigeria, as it looks to ramp up its already bulky fintech proposition.
The group, which has amassed more than 300-million clients across the continent, has put the scale of its fintech business at the top of its growth priority list.
Serigne Dioum, CEO of the group’s fintech franchise, told investors on Wednesday that the company is looking to sweat its Nigerian banking licence.
“The gap between neobanks and fintech is narrowing. For us the most important thing is what services are we going to provide to our customers to fulfil their needs and demands we have in Nigeria,” Dioum said at the group’s capital markets day.
“In Nigeria we have a banking licence, but [it] has gaps. We can’t currently do lending to our clients. We also can’t participate in remittances directly and other services we can’t do.
“We are in the process of augmenting our licence to enable us to provide those services that will become an ecosystem of services for our customers.”
It remains to be seen whether MTN succeeds in its endeavour to augment its licence as Nigerian authorities have been cautious about granting full mobile money operator licences to telecom providers.
The Nigerian autorities have preferred to opt for the payment service bank (PSB) model that restricts the range of services that companies such as MTN can offer.
The situation is different in Ghana, where MTN’s MoMo poses a big threat to the country’s established financial institutions. In Ghana almost two thirds of the company’s customers have active mobile money wallets.
Dioum has been in the role since 2023 and has direct sight of the group’s fintech proposition in about 14 markets.
The group’s fintech business has grown hugely over the past six years and raked in nearly R30bn in revenue in the 2025 financial year.
The size of the business and its growth prospects have heightened speculation that the Ralph Mupita-led telecom behemoth might want to spin off the business to unlock value.
However, Mupita told investors that this is not the group’s obsession.
Meanwhile MTN has joined Vodacom in tapping Chinese tech giant Ant International to boost its fintech business through a new super app.
The new partnership is expected to roll out first in Nigeria, MTN’s largest market, in the third quarter of the year.
The company’s mobile money MoMo platform closed 2025 with 3.7-million active wallets in Nigeria, far lower than its target of 30-million to 40-million. The large unbanked population in that country presents a big opportunity.
MTN said the new rollout will introduce a superapp platform “designed to enhance user experience, deepen digital inclusion and enable a next-generation ecosystem for digital finance, lifestyle and commerce services around MoMo”.
By leveraging Ant International’s technology, “MTN is evolving MoMo to enable stronger ecosystem integration” through a mini app platform, enhanced fraud prevention and “richer engagement features for consumers and merchants”.
Based in Singapore, Ant International is the global arm of the Chinese fintech giant Ant Group.
MTN said the partnership represents “a major step in building a more resilient and future-ready digital ecosystem”.
In similar fashion, rival Vodacom teamed up with Alipay, a unit of Ant Group, to launch an e-commerce super app platform similar to China’s WeChat in 2020.
MTN is continuing the work of carving out its fintech business into a separate standalone entity. It operates separately with its own management, customer base and reporting structure.
MTN has long argued that the value of such assets is not truly reflected in its share price.
The structural separation has entailed a complex process for the group that has to be carried out in every country individually. The group has received key approvals for the process in Uganda and Ghana.
In April, MTN said it had completed the fintech business separation in Ghana.
In January 2024, payments giant Mastercard invested R3.8bn in MTN’s fintech business as part of a plan to partner with industry experts to help grow the new revenue line. The transaction values the unit at $5.2bn (R86bn).
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