MTN Nigeria MoMo PSB’s Active Wallet Users Skyrocketed to 5.3 Million in 2023

As of December 2023, MTN Nigeria announced that its MoMo Payment Service Bank (PSB) platform had attracted 5.3 million active wallet users.

This marked a significant increase, with the platform adding 3.3 million new wallet users during the year. The company revealed these figures in its full-year 2023 financial results, illustrating the substantial impact of its fintech business on its overall performance.

MTN highlighted the expansion of its agent network as a key factor in driving the growth of the MoMo PSB. Throughout the year, the company expanded its agent network by 103,000, reaching a total of 327,000 agents by the end of December 2023. Additionally, MTN reported that its active merchant ecosystem, which was launched in March 2023, had surpassed 324,000 merchants by the close of the year, according to the company’s records.

Commenting on the company’s fintech business performance for the year, MTN’s CEO, Karl Toriola, said: 

“Our fintech revenue increased by 2.4%, led by Xtratime (our airtime lending product), which rose by 2%. However, despite the challenges from the NIN requirement for KYC introduced in Q4 by the CBN, we added 3.3 million active wallets in the year to 5.3 million. This helped to drive MoMo PSB revenue, which rose by 8.1%.  

“The growing adoption and increased activity within our fintech ecosystem spurred transaction volume growth of 49.2% YoY. We also now have over 326,000 MoMo agents, up 46.0% YoY, and over 324,000 merchants since we started to build out our merchant ecosystem in March 2023. While the overall development of fintech has been slower than anticipated, these milestones mark solid and important progress in scaling our business, particularly the advanced services within our MoMo ecosystem.” 

Toriola added that MTN’s digital business has continued to gain traction on the optimisation of its digital service offers and improved customer journey and partnerships. These underpinned the growth in the active user base of the company’s digital services, with rich media subscriptions excluding Ayoba up by 57.2% to approximately 8 million.  

MTN’s instant messaging platform, Ayoba, recorded a 65.6% growth to 8.6 million active monthly users.  

• “We continue to drive the onboarding of new partners within our digital ecosystem and expand the bouquet of service offerings to sustain the growth of the business. Overall, service revenue from digital services was up by 69.9%,” Toriola stated.