The payment unit of MTN Nigeria Communications Plc, MoMo Payment Service Bank (MoMo PSB), has reported a 566,000 decline in its wallet user base on a National Identity Number (NIN) linkage exercise from January 1 to March 31, 2024.
Karl Toriola, the chief executive officer of MTN Nigeria, disclosed this in the telco’s financial result for the first quarter of 2024.
Toriola noted that Q1 was challenging for the business and said the decline was mainly due to the NIN requirement for KYC validation, impacting almost one million active wallets.
“This affected the development of the business in the period, resulting in a decline in the active MoMo PSB wallet users by 566k in Q1 to 4.8 million,” he said.
MTN’s fintech revenue increased marginally by 0.7 percent to N22.8 billion from N22.6 billion in the same period of 2023.
In terms of agents, the telco said it ended the quarter with 232.3k MoMo agents, which includes OTC agents, reflecting a decline of 94.4k in the period. “Excluding OTC transactions, MoMo agents were 189.6k, In Q1 MoMo added more than 75k merchants, bringing the total number of merchants within our ecosystem to over 400k,” MTN said.
In a recent report, the GSMA acknowledged that the number of registered mobile money accounts in West Africa has doubled since 2013, driven mostly by growth in Nigeria, Ghana, and Senegal.
This has made Sub-Saharan Africa central to global mobile money’s success, as it is home to almost three-quarters of the world’s mobile money accounts.
“Mobile money is often considered an African success story, and in many ways, it is. Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest levels of mobile money adoption in the world,” the global industry body for telcos said.
Mats Granryd, director general of GSMA, highlighted that 1.75 billion registered accounts are now processing $1.4 trillion a year, or about $2.7 million a minute.
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