Africa's Fintech Second Wave: Mobile Money Goes Cross-Border
For most of its history, African mobile money has been a single-country story: M-Pesa is a Kenyan thing, MoMo is a Ghanaian thing, each wallet living inside its own national walls. That's changing fast, and the last few months have produced some genuinely large moves.
M-Pesa crosses into a new market
Safaricom paid US$150 million for a mobile money licence to launch M-Pesa in Ethiopia — one of the clearest signals yet that the region's dominant mobile money operators see growth not in adding features to existing markets, but in exporting the model wholesale to new ones.
Airtel Money goes public
Airtel Money began conditional trading on the London Stock Exchange this month, at an implied valuation of roughly £5.3 billion (~US$7 billion). A standalone public listing for a mobile money arm is a strong statement: the market is treating these wallets as businesses in their own right, not loss-leading features bundled with a telco SIM. Airtel is also reportedly preparing a Mastercard-powered virtual card, a direct move into the card-rail territory M-Pesa and others have been circling.
The infrastructure layer is consolidating too
Less visible than the headline listings, but arguably more consequential for builders: PawaPay, a pan-African payments aggregator, secured a Payment Service Provider licence from the Bank of Mozambique, giving it direct access to that country's mobile money networks rather than routing through a local intermediary. That's the unglamorous plumbing work — licensing, interoperability, direct network access — that determines whether a product can actually launch in a new market in months instead of years.
M-KOPA, the asset-financing and mobile money platform, reported reaching 10 million customers across Africa, with revenue up 45% to US$600 million. Growth at that scale usually means a shift from early-adopter enthusiasm to genuine mass-market habit.
Why this matters beyond the headlines
Three things are happening at once:
- Cross-border expansion — operators moving into new countries wholesale (M-Pesa → Ethiopia) rather than just deepening existing markets.
- Capital markets treating mobile money as a standalone asset class — Airtel Money's listing values the wallet business independently of the telco.
- Interoperability infrastructure maturing — licensing deals like PawaPay's Mozambique PSP status, alongside continued work on schemes like PAPSS (the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System) and central bank digital currency pilots, are quietly making it easier to move money between networks and countries, not just within one.
Put together, this is what a "second wave" of African fintech actually looks like: less about getting a single country onto mobile money for the first time, and more about making the money that's already there move further, faster, and across more borders.
Where this intersects with what we build
We recently shipped , a microfinance platform built around exactly this reality — pushing loan disbursements directly to M-Pesa, Tigo Pesa, Airtel Money and HaloPesa wallets, and reconciling collections across multiple bank rails automatically. Lenders don't get to pick one wallet and wait for the market to standardize around it; the product has to meet borrowers wherever their money already lives. As mobile money keeps consolidating and crossing borders, that multi-rail reality is only going to matter more, not less.
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