MTN Nigeria has reported that active wallets on its MoMo Payment Service Bank (PSB) reached 5.5 million in the second quarter of this year.
The company’s mobile money business bounced back after a 9% decline in wallets it recorded in Q1 2024 due to the impact of the National Identification Number (NIN) requirement for KYC validation.
According to MTN’s half-year 2024 financial results released on Wednesday, MoMo active wallets increased by 701,000 in Q2 to hit the current figure.
“We are pleased with the momentum in wallet adoption in Q2 following the pressure in Q1 from the NIN requirement for KYC validation, which affected approximately a million active wallets,” MTN Nigeria’s CEO, Karl Toriola stated in the report.
Fintech revenue
This growth in mobile money users impacted the company’s fintech revenue, which grew by 11% for the six months and a 22.2% growth in Q2. MTN’s fintech revenue jumped to N48.6 billion in half-year 2024 from N43.6 billion recorded in the same period last year.
Toriola noted that the fintech revenue growth was driven largely by its airtime lending product, Xtratime, even as it saw encouraging growth in the adoption of MoMo services.
He, however, disclosed that the total number of MoMo agents, including those facilitating OTC transactions decreased by 24,000 to 302,800 in the period under review as the uptake of wallets and self-service channels grew.
“Excluding OTC transactions, the number of MoMo agents was relatively flat at 239k. We onboarded over 174k new merchants, bringing the total number of merchants within our ecosystem to approximately 498k.
“The growing adoption and increased activity within our fintech ecosystem spurred a growth of 33.4% YoY in transaction volume. We will leverage the momentum in Q2 to accelerate the development of wallets and MoMo PSB app adoption as we expand our merchant ecosystem,” Toriola said.
Digital service revenue
The MTN CEO reported that the company’s digital services revenue accelerated its growth trajectory, increasing by 98.9% in the first half of the year due to the increasing adoption of its digtal products and expanding partnerships with content providers.
He said the company achieved this through user journey optimization, revamped digital offers, and expanded its active user base, which increased by 5.6 million to 19.6 million.
“Our instant messaging platform, Ayoba, accounted for 46.5% of the active base with 9.1 million monthly users. Subscriptions for rich media services, including music, video, and gaming make up 53.5% of the active base,” he added.
Toriola said MTN has continued to onboard new partners to its digital ecosystem and expand the range of service offerings to sustain the growth of the business.
What you should know
Despite the revenue growth recorded across its business segments, including voice, which rose by 12.4%, and data, which increased by 54.7%, MTN posted a pre-tax loss of N175.6 billion for the quarter ending June 30, 2024.
According to the company, the depreciation of the naira between the periods ended December 2023 and June 2024 also resulted in materially higher net forex losses of N887.7 billion. This also led to a loss after tax of N519.1 billion compared to a restated loss of N85.6 billion in half-year.
