Mastercard to acquire a minority stake in MTN’s $5.2 billion fintech business

Global payments company, Mastercard has agreed to purchase a minority stake in MoMo, MTN’s $5.2 billion fintech business. This is coming two years after Mastercard invested $100 million in Airtel Mobile Commerce BV, the holding company for Airtel Africa’s mobile money operations.

According to MTN Group President and CEO Ralph Mupita, the deal will be structured as a commercial partnership on payments and remittances employing Mastercard’s technical infrastructure to develop throughout Africa and an investment in a minority share. Bloomberg said that the share size would be announced after completing the transaction.

In the first half of this year, the volume of transactions by the fintech business increased by 37% to 8.3 billion. These were executed by 61 million active MoMo customers.

“We delivered a resilient performance in H1 23 and made good strategic progress against a tough macro backdrop,” says Mupita. “In South Africa, we were very encouraged by the improved network availability on the back of our power-resilience investment, resulting in a stronger Q2 23 performance than Q1 23.”

In Nigeria, the leading African telco said “[it] delivered a very strong operational result, having navigated the cash shortages in Q1 23 and increased inflation. The policy changes implemented in Nigeria in Q2 23 have short-term negative impacts, but we see these as being very constructive for the investment climate in the medium to longer term.”