South African mobile network operator MTN’s latest financial results showed a solid 14% growth of its fintech business over the first 6 months of 2022. The volume of mobile money transactions increased by 31.5% year-on-year while the value of transactions increased by 11.7%.
The company’s active mobile money customers also increased by 24.0% to 60.7 million. The number of agents was also up by 26.9% to 1.1 million while merchants increased by 62.7% to a total of 946 249 across MTN’s 19 markets.
According to MTN, the growth in fintech revenue was mainly driven by the company’s deliberate decision to cut person-to-person (P2P) pricing in markets such as Ghana and Ivory Coast, as well as introduction of new taxes and levies charged to consumers on mobile money transactions in some markets.
In Nigeria, MTN added 37 109 mobile money agents to end the period with more than 800 000 registered agents, approximately 166 000 of whom were active (i.e. performed a minimum of 10 revenue-generating transactions in a 30-day period).
The company’s Nigerian mobile money payment service bank (MoMo PSB) commenced operations in May 2022 with its primary focus on accelerating the mobile money wallet uptake, getting existing over-the-counter (OTC) platform users to own a wallet, and expanding services to new users of fintech offerings.
Even though MTN’s MoMo PSB suffered a security breach that cost the company (the customer has since denied any loss of customer funds or data) 22 billion naira ($53 million), the mobile money service has signed up a total of 4.2 million users, 2.4 million of which were active users in the six weeks from launch to the end of the first 6 months of 2022.
The company also reports having made significant progress in expanding its payments and e-commerce ecosystem with gross merchandise value (GMV) of mobile money merchants’ payments having increased by 88.7% year-on-year to $7.9 billion.
The Group’s total value of remittances grew by 4.5% to $1.1 billion while its BankTech services facilitated a total loan value of $560.3 million a growth of 35.5% YoY year-on-year.
Elsewhere in its financial results, MTN’s insurtech platform reached 17.9 million registered policies, up by 31.9%. Digital services revenue increased by 6.7% to $97 million, with super app Ayoba growing its user base to 14.9 million thanks to an 87.4% year-on-year increase of monthly active users (MAUs).
Data revenue and data traffic grew by 35.9% and 43.3% respectively in the first 6 months of 2022. This growth was supported by the 14.2% YoY growth in active data subscribers and the 25.5% increase in data usage (to 7.6GB per user per month).
MTN’s fibre entity MTN GlobalConnect signed fixed external infrastructure deals worth $8.9 million in total contract value terms (TCV) and external revenue grew by 7.0% year-on-year to $151.4 million, with mobility revenue up by 6%.
