MTN and the vendor underline this ambition, broadening the scope of MTN’s existing mobile financial services
Ericsson’s Michael Wallis-Brown reckons the firm could underpin 50% of the African mobile money market. He was quoted in a BNN Bloomberg interview saying, “We’re touching 10% of the market in Africa today, and we can get to 50%…That’s enormous growth for us.”
Ericsson already runs one of the largest white-label platforms for mobile financial services in the world, serving more than 400 million mobile wallet accounts in 24 countries. Wallis-Brown, a veteran fintech exec, became the Global Head of Mobile Financial Services at Ericsson last autumn.
And to prove his point, earlier this week Ericsson and MTN Group announced they will extend their 10-year partnership. MTN Group already has 63 million active subscribers on the Ericsson platform. Now the plan is to move the platform to public cloud so its services are “able to literally scale exponentially,” Wallis-Brown said in the BNN Bloomberg interview.
Two-pronged attack
The expansion with MTN is two-fold. First to reach more of Africa’s unbanked population with services like MTN’s Mobile Money (MoMo) service on the Ericsson platform. MTN’s Mobile Money services are used by more than 63 million active subscribers across 16 countries in Africa.
The total value of the transactions handled annually by its MoMo services rose from $76 billion in 2018 to $204 billion in 2022. The number of transactions increased by almost 300% during that period.
Secondly, MTN plans to offer more advanced digital financial services for individuals and all kinds of enterprises.
Serigne Dioum, Chief Fintech Officer at MTN Group, commented, “Our collaboration with Ericsson is a significant milestone in the execution of our Ambition 2025 [growth plan]”. A main plank of this was to create the biggest and most valuable platform business in Africa.
Model with wide application
Wallis-Brown added, “Ericsson’s partnership with MTN is a world-leading example of [how] mobile financial services [can] financially empower people and business – from giving the unbanked their first opportunity to control their finances, [to] making it easier for women to access financial services and promoting digital inclusion.”
In combination with offering more advanced services, he continued, “This model can be applied in any market anywhere in the world to…empower mobile subscribers of all financial standings.”
Ericsson does not publish details of its fintech platform’s business model such as revenue share.