MTN MoMo crosses $500bn transaction mark as lending triples, but Nigeria still lags

MTN Group’s mobile money platform processed $500.3 billion in transaction value in 2025, a 37.6% jump in constant currency terms. That number alone demands context.

On a reported basis, comparing the $321.3 billion MTN processed in 2024, the year-on-year increase is closer to 55.7%, a figure inflated partly by currency movements but extraordinary by any measure.

Transaction volumes rose 14.9% to 23.3 billion over the same period. The gap between volume growth and value growth tells the more interesting story. Africans are not just transacting more frequently on MTN’s platform. They are transacting in larger amounts, which points to a shift from airtime top-ups and small peer-to-peer transfers toward higher-value commercial activity.

Where is that commercial activity happening? Ghana, Uganda and, to a growing degree, Rwanda. Where is it conspicuously not scaling at the same rate? Nigeria.

The lending surge

The standout number in MTN’s 2025 fintech results is not the half-trillion transaction value. It is the $3.5 billion in total loan value facilitated through its platform, an 80.4% increase in constant currency. To put that in perspective, MTN’s lending business roughly doubled in a single year.

MTN attributed the surge to higher utilisation of its marketplace lending offering and the MoMo Advance programme, particularly in Uganda and Ghana. New product launches in Rwanda, Zambia, Cameroon and Congo-Brazzaville added further momentum.

What it has not disclosed is the default rate on those loans, the average tenor, or the interest rate structure. 

For a journalist covering predatory lending in African fintech, those are the questions that follow naturally from an 80% jump in loan origination in a single year.

The lending growth also sits inside a broader structural shift. Advanced services, which include lending, insurance, investment products and digital payments, now account for 34.1% of total MoMo revenue, up from roughly 29.9% in 2024. That 4.2 percentage point gain represents a business repositioning. MTN is not a payments company that does some lending. It is becoming a financial services company that still carries a telecom licence.

Ghana as a policy case study

Ghana’s fintech revenue rose 33.3% in constant currency to ~GH₵5.85 billion (~GH₵5.85 billion), with active users up 12.3% to 19.3 million. The headline driver was policy, not product. Ghana abolished its e-levy in 2025, a transaction tax that had suppressed mobile money activity since its introduction in 2022. With the levy gone, withdrawal and transfer volumes grew 26.2% in constant currency as demand rebounded.

Advanced services in Ghana grew 51.6% in constant currency, reflecting product adoption as the Ghanaian economy stabilised. A stronger cedi and subsiding inflation gave consumers more capacity for higher-value transactions and the appetite to try lending, insurance and investment products.

In the fourth quarter, MTN launched a mutual fund product in Ghana allowing customers invest in Ghanaian stocks and bonds directly through MoMo. That product is a direct challenge to the brokerage and asset management sector. Nigeria’s regulators and fintech players should be watching it closely.

The Ghana story carries a direct lesson for Nigeria’s fintech policy debate. Transaction taxes, whether on mobile money specifically or on electronic transfers broadly, suppress financial activity and disproportionately affect low-income users who lack alternatives. Ghana’s rebound after the e-levy removal is the data point to cite in that argument.

The Nigeria gap

MTN Group CEO Ralph Mupita acknowledged on Monday that Nigeria remains the company’s biggest fintech challenge. He cited ‘green shoots’, a phrase that suggests awareness of underperformance without a clear timetable for resolution.

Ralph Mupita

The reasons are structural. Nigeria’s CBN has been cautious about granting full mobile money operator licences to telcos, preferring a payment service bank model that restricts the range of services MTN can offer. OPay and PalmPay, both fintech entities without the telco overhead, have aggressively captured the agent banking market that MTN would otherwise dominate by network reach alone.

In 2024, MTN’s own results showed that agent rationalisation efforts in Nigeria dragged down the group’s active agent count by 9% to 1.2 million. The 2025 rebound to 1.4 million, up 19.4%, suggests MTN rebuilt that network, but the underlying question remains.

Can MTN Nigeria compete on fintech against nimbler, regulation-native rivals while carrying a heavier cost structure?

Mupita also flagged structural separation of the fintech business in key markets as a priority, noting it is at the regulatory stage. That separation, if completed in Nigeria, would allow MTN to attract outside investment into the fintech subsidiary without the constraint of the listed telco parent. It would also force a cleaner accounting of what the fintech business actually earns and costs in the Nigerian market, a figure MTN has not disclosed in isolation.

What the agent and merchant numbers reveal

MTN’s agent network grew 19.4% to 1.4 million in 2025, reversing the contraction recorded in 2024. Merchant acceptance points grew 15.7% to 2.1 million. Those are distribution infrastructure numbers, not just fintech metrics.

In markets where smartphone penetration and internet access remain patchy, the physical agent is the financial system for a large portion of the population. MTN’s ability to grow that network while simultaneously pushing customers toward advanced digital services is the operational challenge at the centre of its Ambition 2030 strategy.

Cross-border remittances reached $6.2 billion in 2025, up 10.9%, as MTN built direct integrations with formal remittance channels to pull traffic from informal corridors. That growth rate is slower than most other metrics in the fintech business, which suggests the informal corridor remains sticky. Price, convenience and trust are still barriers.

The structural question

MTN’s fintech revenue reached R28.8 billion (~$1.71 billion) on a pro forma basis in 2025, up 23.2% in constant currency. The business is large, growing and increasingly profitable at the margin. The EBITDA margin for fintech remains in the mid-to-high 30% range, above most pure-play African fintechs and comfortably above MTN’s connectivity business.

The Ambition 2030 strategy positions fintech as one of three pillars alongside connectivity and digital infrastructure. The numbers support that positioning.

The question MTN has not yet answered publicly is what fintech looks like as a standalone entity, market by market, once the structural separations are complete. 

Ghana and Uganda are the most mature. Nigeria is the most important. The gap between those two facts is where MTN’s fintech story will be written over the next three years.

MTN MoMo: 2024 vs 2025 at a glance

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