Ericsson, MTN Group extend partnership to financially empower citizens in Africa

Swedish telecom gear maker Ericsson and the MTN Group have strengthened their partnership to enhance mobile financial services and financially empower citizens across Africa.

“The partnership is set to broaden the scope of financial inclusion from first-time users to high-end business applications, utilizing MTN’s Mobile Money (MoMo) service on the Ericsson Wallet Platform,” Ericsson said in a statement Tuesday.

The extended partnership includes a shift to public cloud deployments and the refinement of the Open API services framework, which will expedite “fintech innovation” in Africa, said Ericsson.

Further, entrepreneurs will have an opportunity to develop revenue-generating applications, and by utilising Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD), enable an automated software development and deployment workflow for the MTN Mobile Money fintech platform across all of its African operations.

MTN MoMo customers can securely manage funds, pay merchants and utility providers, and access loans and insurance services with ease and affordability, promoting financial freedom and stability.

The platform places a strong emphasis on financial technology (FinTech), with focus areas including the growth of merchant and e-commerce payments, facilitating national and international money transfers among family members and others (remittance services), advancing banking solutions (BankTech), and offering insurance services (InsurTech).

“With 63.5 million active users, our Mobile Money platform is advancing economic empowerment across the continent,” said Serigne Dioum, Chief Fintech Officer, MTN Group. “Our collaboration with Ericsson is a significant milestone in the execution of our Ambition 2025 – building the largest and most valuable platform business and create shared value for our customers in Africa,” he added.

As per the statement, over 63 million MTN active subscribers use the company’s Mobile Money platform in some form across Africa. The MTN MoMo annual transaction value has almost tripled since 2018, growing from $76 billion in 2018 to $204 billion in 2022. Transaction volumes increased by almost 300% during the same period – from 3.5 billion transactions in 2018 to 12.7 billion in 2022.

At the same time, Ericsson said its Wallet Platform supports more than 400 million registered mobile wallets and processes more than 2.8 billion transactions, worth more than $40 billion, every month through telecom operators and financial institutions globally.

“Ericsson’s partnership with MTN is a world-leading example of the ability of mobile financial services to financially empower people and business – from giving the unbanked their first opportunity to control their finances, making it easier for women to access financial services and promoting digital inclusion – to enabling more advanced users to access high-end services,” said Michael Wallis-Brown, Head of Mobile Financial Services, Ericsson.