MTN Confirms Plans for Banking Licences in Select African Markets

By Adedapo Adesanya

MTN Group has confirmed plans to explore banking licences in selected African markets as the telecommunications giant seeks to deepen its fintech operations and eventually provide loans directly from its own balance sheet.

The chief executive of the firm, Mr Ralph Mupita, disclosed the plan on Tuesday, saying lending has emerged as one of the major growth opportunities for the company as it seeks to diversify beyond traditional telecommunications services.

Mr Mupita said the telco giant was assessing markets where it has large customer bases and significant funds held in mobile money wallets to determine where obtaining banking licences would make commercial sense.

“We’re beginning to explore, where it makes sense and where there are large customer bases and significant floats in wallets, whether it may make sense to have some sort of banking licence that enables us to take deposits,” he said.

According to him, obtaining such licences would allow MTN to gradually move towards lending from its own balance sheet, while maintaining partnerships with banks and other financial institutions.

“As such, we will then be lending over time off our own balance sheet. But also, it doesn’t mean we won’t do any partnership lending,” Mr Mupita said.

The move marks a further expansion of MTN’s strategy to transform its mobile money business into a broader fintech platform offering payments, e-commerce, remittances and credit services.

“We’re seeing good growth on advanced services, which are our future-proof services,” he said, adding that “the big growth now, which will be the growth of the future, is actually lending.”

MTN currently offers loans largely through partnerships with banks. Securing banking licences in selected markets would give the group greater control over its lending operations and enable it to capture more value from the credit segment.

The company, however, plans to adopt the strategy selectively rather than roll it out across all its operations.

Mr Mupita said the transition to balance-sheet lending would also be gradual because of the risks associated with credit provision.

The development builds on MTN’s broader fintech restructuring across its African markets. In its first-half 2026 results, the group said fintech transaction value rose 33.8 per cent to $330.5 billion, while advanced services grew 31.8 per cent. Mobile Money monthly active users also increased 12.1 per cent to 70.8 million.

MTN operates across 19 markets with 317.7 million customers, making its large customer and mobile-money base a significant platform for the expansion of its financial services business.

The planned move also follows earlier indications from MTN Fintech chief executive, Mr Serigne Dioum, that the company intended to move further up the lending value chain by seeking licences that would allow it to lend directly to customers and deploy its own balance sheet.

“We’ve expanded access to credit for more people, but we also want to move further up the lending value chain,” Mr Dioum told investors at the company’s capital markets day in June.