MTN Zambia Mobile Money hits over 4.5 million subscribers!

MTN Zambia has celebrated a huge milestone this year by reaching over 4.5 million subscribers on its mobile money base.  They shared this at an event held at the MTN headquarters in Roma, Lusaka, yesterday.

Komba Malukutila, who is MTN Zambia Fintech Managing Director, shared that at the beginning of 2020 MTN Zambia MoMo just had slightly over 3 million subscribers, so the growth has definitely been significant.

The COVID-19 pandemic, has pushed a lot of digitization of many products and services in the quest to encourage social distancing, with many businesses turning to mobile money and other cashless options to make transactions.

In Zambia, this led to increased uptake of services like ePayments for utilities, and food delivery and other couriers having demand for their services increased.

This year, MTN has worked on many essential partnerships, like integrating MoMo payments with other service providers in other industries for ease of payments, and with technology incubators like Bongohive to assist developers aligned with the hub to integrate their products onto the MTN MoMo API.

Malukutila highlighted some other achievements that MTN has had in 2020:

• launching Xtra Cash, which allows for collateral-free loans to subscribers
• launching payment of services with AfriDelivery and Tigmoo Eats. two of Zambia’s biggest food delivery services.
• launching payment services with Lafarge for cement deliveries
• launching Ayo Send With Care, which has garnered over 250000 insurance policies issued.

In more MoMo updates, MTN Zambia zero rated P2P fees from K0 to K150 bands during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Bank of Zambia was able to increase transactional limits on the mobile money platform up to k100,000 and k2,000,000 for customers and agents respectively in order to drive more e-payments.

“The Zambian government has emphasized the need to achieve universal access and usage of broad range of quality and affordable financial services that meet the needs of both individuals and enterprises. To actualize this transformation, the government has formulated a five (5) year national financial inclusion strategy which provides a roadmap to further accelerate financial inclusion journey in Zambia by setting forth a series of specific actions for a wide range of stakeholders such as ours,” Komba Malukutila.

“I wish to emphasize that this celebration we are witnessing today of reaching over 4.5 million customers has come at the right time because the government has already implemented the core national financial inclusion strategy and platforms which are key for access to financial inclusion,” he added.