MFS Africa is a payment gateway for mobile money systems.

African fintech MFS Africa announced on Monday that its payment gateway now covered the transactions from over 320 million mobile money wallets, enabling various banks, telecom providers, money transfer operators, and other financial institutions interoperability at scale in Africa through a single hub, the largest in Africa. (CISION PRNewswire)

The company cited a publication by the GSMA titled “The 2021 State of the Industry report on Mobile Money,” as the basis for the statistic on mobile money wallets. By that figure, MFS now straddles 60% of all mobile money wallets in sub-Saharan Africa.

In December 2020, MFS partnered with Xoom, a PayPal service to offer mobile money transfers to seven countries across Africa. MFS Africa now connects Xoom to its digital payments hub allowing that company’s customers in the UK, Europe, and North America to send money to people in Cameroon, Ghana, Rwanda, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Cote d’Ivoire, Madagascar, Malawi, and Mozambique have since been added by Zoom.

The GSMA highlighted this MFS-Xoom partnership as an industry highlight in its report.

“In 2010, MFS Africa took a bet that mobile money accounts would be the most dominant form of financial accounts in Africa and emerging markets at large. The new numbers released by the GSMA have now removed any lingering doubts about that. We also wagered that through our work, these accounts would be able to exchange value with each other and with the rest of the world, in the same way, that we communicate with each other by mobile phones. We are now in a position to make that a reality for over 320 million accounts in Africa. This means that a tech company in Liberia can now gun for a market 64x the size of its home market – underlining the positive economic impact that creating new financial pathways can create.”

Earlier this month, MFS Africa hired several senior personnel at its London office, targeting banks, other financial institutions, and global development organizations (GDOs) for a range of new offerings.

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