A mobile-money payment can look simple from the customer’s side: send, receive, confirm. At MTN’s scale, that moment rests on a far more demanding system—wallet balances, agent networks, merchant integrations, fraud controls, APIs, dispute handling and regulated financial products operating across very different markets.
That is why Ericsson’s recent migration of MTN Group Fintech’s MoMo platform matters. Ericsson says it has completed a transition in Eswatini, Ghana, Rwanda and Uganda from a legacy virtualised environment to a standardised cloud-native architecture, with Cameroon under way. The company reports up to 80% faster API response times in migrated markets. Those are vendor-reported performance claims, not proof of financial inclusion. But they point to a more important shift: mobile money is becoming infrastructure that must support an ecosystem, not merely a wallet.
The 2020 starting point was already substantial
In 2020, MTN reported 35.1 million active MoMo customers at the end of its first quarter. Its stated direction was to extend financial services to more people and small businesses, add products and make payment acceptance viable for smaller merchants including through USSD for feature-phone users.
The original material does not establish a single, verifiable MTN–Ericsson “2020 goal” against which to score today’s result. It is more useful to view 2020 as a baseline. At the time, the question was how to bring more people into digital payments. By 2025, MTN was operating a much larger and more complex financial-services platform: 69.5 million active MoMo customers, US$500.3 billion in fintech transaction value, and US$3.6 billion in loans disbursed during the year.
This is not simply a story of adoption. It is a shift from cash-in and cash-out to a system expected to support merchant payments, lending, savings, remittances and third-party services. The technical burden rises with every new use case.
MTN’s reach turns platform engineering into an inclusion issue
MTN ended 2025 with 307 million voice customers and 172 million data customers across 16 markets. Its primary reporting does not provide a group-wide mobile-money market-share percentage, so claims of continental market share should be treated carefully. Ericsson has described MoMo as Africa’s largest mobile-money service, but that is a supplier characterisation rather than an independently calculated current share.
The more defensible point is that MTN has unusual distribution power. A platform serving nearly 70 million active mobile-money users can affect the practical economics of building payment services for merchants, banks, startups and public programmes. If partners can integrate reliably, reconcile transactions and reach customers through channels they already use, the cost of launching a useful service can fall.
Ericsson has been part of that technical relationship for more than a decade. Its role has included the Wallet and Fintech Platform, systems integration, managed support and the MoMo Open API ecosystem. In 2024, the partners also outlined public-cloud and continuous-delivery work intended to make software change less manual and more repeatable across markets.
A faster API does not help a household on its own. It can, however, make it easier for a school-fee platform, an agricultural buyer, a merchant tool or a lender to connect to a payment rail that customers already trust. At scale, that is how infrastructure becomes an inclusion enabler.
Cloud-native does not equal inclusive by default
The migration should not be read as a technical shortcut to financial inclusion. The World Bank’s Global Findex analysis found that 28% of adults in Sub-Saharan Africa held a mobile-money account in 2022, but also identified lack of money, phone access and documentation as persistent barriers. Gender, income, education, rurality and age continue to shape who can use digital finance safely and regularly.
The distinction between registered accounts and active use is equally important. GSMA reported 2.3 billion registered mobile-money accounts globally in 2025, but 593 million active 30-day accounts. Scale matters, but a wallet that is dormant, costly to use or vulnerable to fraud is not a reliable route to financial health.
For MTN and its partners, the operational agenda therefore extends beyond throughput. It includes affordable cash-in and cash-out, resilient USSD and agent journeys, understandable support, secure identity and know-your-customer processes, fraud prevention, transparent fees and meaningful consumer redress. It also includes interoperability: a payment has more value when a recipient can use it across the bank, wallet, merchant and agent channels that fit their economic life.
The next gain is dependable participation
MTN’s Ambition 2030 places fintech alongside connectivity and digital infrastructure. The Ericsson migration gives that strategy a stronger technical base in the markets already moved: a standardised platform that should be easier to operate, evolve and connect to through APIs.
The test now is not whether the architecture is modern. It is whether more people and businesses can participate with confidence. That requires measuring more than transaction volume: successful merchant payments, time to resolve failed transactions, fraud-loss outcomes, agent liquidity, active use by women and rural customers, and the cost of accepting digital payments for small firms.
Financial inclusion advances when a person can receive money, keep it safely, pay with it, resolve a problem and use it to participate in ordinary economic life. Platform modernisation can make those outcomes easier to deliver. It cannot substitute for the policy, product and operational work that makes them real.
At Xelius, we approach payment and financial-infrastructure work as a decision and operating-system challenge, rather than a standalone technology purchase. Organisations assessing payment ecosystems, platform integration or data-driven service operations can contact us at hello@xelius.org.
