👨🏿‍🚀TechCabal Daily – MonieWorld, MonieExit

MTN already has Nigeria’s phone users. Now it wants more of them to use its financial services too. Now, Africa’s largest telecoms company is targeting as many as 30 million fintech customers in Nigeria over the medium term, up from about five million today.

What happened? Ralph Mupita, MTN Group chief executive officer, said that the company sees a path to converting 30%—and potentially 50%—of its Nigerian telecoms customers into fintech users. To get there, MTN is bringing in technology from Alibaba, Alipay, and Ant International, while preparing to expand beyond payments into lending.

Explain like I’m new here: MTN’s fintech business started with mobile money and payments—often through partnerships with banks. The company is now trying to sell more services, including payments, lending, remittances, and insurance, to the people already using its mobile network. In Nigeria, that means growing in a market where OPay, PalmPay, MoneyPoint, and other digital fintechs are already competing for customers.

State of play: Five million customers becoming 30 million would mean adding roughly 25 million people to MTN’s Nigerian fintech base—six times its current size. Across Africa, MTN’s MoMo monthly active users rose 12.1% to 70.8 million in the six months ended June 2026, while fintech transaction value reached $330.5 billion in constant currency. 

Nigeria is only one part of that business, but it is an important test of whether MTN can turn its enormous telecom distribution network into a financial services advantage. The next stage is riskier. MTN currently works with partner banks that use customer data to assess borrowers, but Mupita said the group increasingly intends to lend from its own balance sheet. That could give MTN more control and more credit risk. The company says it will move incrementally.

Zoom out: MTN is not trying to build another standalone fintech app and hope people download it. It is using its existing network, customer relationships, and merchant base to push financial services deeper into everyday life. If you ask us, it is primarily asking its mobile network users in Nigeria to learn a new habit: ‘don’t just see us as a call and data provider; use us to move money, too.’ That ambition already shows in how it has built and scaled its app, myMTN NG. 

MTN, however, is not juicing up on irrational optimism: its competitor Airtel Nigeria’s mobile money revenue and users grew to $9 million and 2.7 million, respectively, in the year ended March 2026—growing both metrics by at least 59%. MTN thinks it can do better.