MTN reveals plans to become Africa's biggest bank

godfred akoto

January 22, 2018 8:06 AM

MTN has plans to overtake Vodacom in the mobile money industry

Leading South African telco, MTN has revealed an ambitious plan to become Africas biggest bank, pitching it against Vodacom in that space.

This was revealed at the Deloitte Africa in 2018 Outlook Conference in South Africa by the company's CEO Rob Shuter.

“The core digital service that we have decided to put our money on is Mobile Money. Mobile money is really about leveraging the strength of the brand and leveraging the strength of the distribution because we have built a huge informal distribution network for prepaid airtime to bring customers into a transactional banking system.”

According to Mr.Shuter, MTN wants to build Mobile Money into a 60 million customer business in the next three to four years.

“We will be the largest bank in Africa, leveraging scale, network, brand, infrastructure and distribution.

According to Mr. Shuter, MTN now has 21 million customers.

Vodacom owns about 35 percent of Nairobi-based Safaricom Ltd., whose fast-growing M-Pesa banking service has made it Kenya’s biggest company. Together they have about 32 million banking customers in Africa.

Vodacom CEO Shameel Joosub in an interview with bloomberg in December ,2017 said that Vodacom was the “biggest bank in Africa,” having moved about $100 billion through M-Pesa in the last year.

godfred akoto