MTN Group Fintech, the fintech arm of pan-African telecoms operator MTN Group, has completed the migration of its mobile money service (MoMo) to a standardised cloud-native architecture across Eswatini, Ghana, Rwanda and Uganda, in partnership with Ericsson. The milestone marks an ongoing plan in MTN's move to place fintech at the top of digital financial services expansion across Africa, in line with the group's Ambition 2030 strategy.

In a press statement released by Ericsson on Friday, the company said the cloud systems are built on the Ericsson Fintech Platform and are expected to improve platform performance and operational efficiency. The migration transitions MTN MoMo from a legacy virtualised environment to core cloud infrastructure. Cloud-native platforms run software as small, independently updatable services rather than single large applications, which typically makes them faster to scale, update and repair than the virtualised systems they replace.

"As demand for digital financial services continues to grow across Africa, mobile money platforms require resilient, scalable infrastructure that can support increasing transaction volumes while maintaining service availability," part of the statement reads.

The transition comes at a time when mobile money and fintech are transforming how Africans keep their money, access it and transfer it from anywhere to anywhere. Migrating the cloud infrastructure enables faster integration for merchants and customers, and establishes the foundation required to expand fintech in line with MTN's Ambition 2030.

In his reaction to the development, Artemij Demidczyk, Acting Chief Technology and Information Officer at MTN Group Fintech, noted that the MoMo Evolved Migration advances the company's broad vision of building Africa's leading digital financial platform.

"Through a cloud-native foundation, we are enhancing performance, strengthening resilience, and accelerating the delivery of innovative digital financial services for consumers, merchants, and partners across our markets," he added.

Rollout to reach 16 markets before 2030

With the completion in four African countries, the company said an ongoing project has started in Cameroon, and the markets of the Republic of the Congo, Benin and Zambia are next in line. The migration is expected to cut across all of MTN Group's 16 markets in Africa before 2030.

The strategic move to power MoMo's infrastructure comes at a critical time for the company and for Africa. MTN Group has been structurally separating MoMo and fintech operations from its traditional telecom/GSM business across African markets, notably in Nigeria, Ghana and Uganda. In Nigeria, the mobile money business operates as MoMo Payment Service Bank under a Central Bank of Nigeria licence, and in Ghana the separated mobile money unit, MobileMoney Ghana, was listed on the Ghana Stock Exchange in 2025. The separation aims to satisfy local financial regulations, secure independent capital, accelerate digital innovation, and let telecom entities refocus strictly on core connectivity.

Mobile money is driving financial inclusion and economic growth in Africa. Since Safaricom's M-Pesa pioneered the model in Kenya in 2007, phone-based payments have become a pillar of the continent's economy: industry body GSMA reported global mobile money transaction value of roughly $1.1 trillion in 2023, with Sub-Saharan Africa accounting for the largest share. At a time of massive adoption of digital payments, mobile money allows unbanked people to use basic mobile phones to store cash, send remittances, pay bills and run micro-businesses without visiting a physical bank. It is also a crowded field, with MTN MoMo competing against Safaricom's M-Pesa and Airtel Africa's Airtel Money, among others.

Measured performance gains

Following the migration to cloud-native architecture, Ericsson said MTN experienced reduced CPU processing overhead and database load by up to 86%. This is an effort to reduce the loading time of the app when performing a transfer or any other operation. Across the migrated markets, the deployment has also reduced application and database resource utilisation and delivered faster API response times by up to 80%, making the platform lighter and faster to use instead of heavy and slow.

Building on Ericsson's infrastructure allows the African telecom giant to improve customer experience on its MoMo platform, elevate operational efficiency, and strengthen platform performance. It also enables the scalability needed to support future innovation and financial inclusion.

MTN's migration of its MoMo infrastructure to a core network prepares the business for a defining moment. Digital payments and fintech are improving every day with new startups, innovators and users, and building the network that allows active competition and the seamless onboarding of new users matters. Markers to watch ahead of 2030 include the pace of the Cameroon migration, the rollout to the Republic of the Congo, Benin and Zambia, and how the group's market-by-market separations and licensing progress across its 16 African markets. People want to send money using the easiest and error-free method, and they will adopt a product that offers such value — a path MTN is walking as it gives Africans what they need.