The payment service subsidiary of MTN Nigeria, MoMo PSB, recorded a 53.1% year-on-year increase in active wallet users to 3.6 million in Q3 2023.
MTN disclosed this in its Q3 financial statement released on Monday.
Quarter on quarter, the growth represented a 16% increase compared with the 3.1 million active wallets the company recorded in the previous quarter.
The increase in MoMo wallets boosted MTN’s fintech business in the quarter.
According to the company, MoMo users now account for 40.6% of its fintech customers.
However, the number of active MoMo wallet users is quite low compared with the number of registered users. The report shows that there were 27.9 million registered MoMo users at the end of Q3.
MTN said MoMo PSB now has over 293,000 agents, up by 55.7% year-on-year bringing its services closer to the people.
It said the PSB had also onboarded a total of 197,000 merchants since it started building its merchant ecosystem in March 2023.
MTN’s fintech revenue
Commenting on the company’s fintech business performance for the quarter, MTN’s CEO, Karl Toriola, said:
- “Our fintech business continued to gain traction, recovering from the slowdown in H1. Fintech revenue increased by 5.6% as we increased the adoption of our core fintech services (wallet and MoMo agent business). Our fintech active user base was down by 20.4% YoY but rose by 27.2% QoQ to 8.9 million.
- “The decline recorded YoY was due to a slowdown in activity level on the over-the-top (OTC) platform following the cash shortages in Q1. However, our efforts to rebuild the base continue to yield results with a 25.5% growth in OTC users versus Q1 2023.”
MTN’s digital revenue for Q3 also grew by 55.4% on increased adoption of its digital products and the growth of the active base which rose by 67% to 16.1 million.
The company said growth in the monthly active users of Ayoba, its instant messaging platform, remained on track with the addition of over 2.8 million users, bringing the active users to approximately 8 million.
While noting that the company was well-positioned to drive the growth of active wallets and merchant ecosystems with consumer education and commercial activities, Toriola said MoMo PSB would also be leveraging its agent network to take the service closer to its customers.
MTN was issued a Payment Service Bank (PSB) licence last year alongside the three other mobile network operators, Airtel (Smart Cash PSB), Glo (Moneymaster PSB), and 9mobile (9PSB) to deepen financial inclusion in the country.
As a PSB, MoMo can collect deposits and offer savings accounts to its consumers. Individuals and small enterprises are among their clients. It can also facilitate cross-border transfers through all of Nigeria’s available methods.
