MTN Group, Africa's largest telecoms operator, is aiming to grow its Nigerian fintech customer base from five million users to as many as 30 million over the medium term, and is preparing to push deeper into lending, including extending credit from its own balance sheet.

Speaking to TechCabal a day after MTN released its six-month financial results, group CEO Ralph Mupita said Nigeria remains a key market for expanding the company's fintech business.

"It would be converting more of the Nigerian customers who are using our telecommunications services into fintech customers," he said.

Mupita stated that raising that conversion ratio to 30%, or potentially 50%, would translate into around 30 million customers. "Can we grow from 5 million to 30 million customers over the medium term? If we did that, I guess we would be able to say to you in the medium term that we've been successful," he noted.

MTN has built one of the continent's biggest mobile-money businesses, but with far more telecom customers than MoMo users, the group has a large opportunity to turn its network into a fintech growth engine. That opportunity is most pronounced in Nigeria, where the company is trying to convert existing users of its telecom services rather than depend only on new customer acquisition.

The ambition comes as MTN's fintech business is already operating at significant scale across Africa. In the six months ended June, MoMo monthly active users rose 12.1% to 70.8 million, while fintech transaction volumes increased 17.2% to 13 billion. Transaction value rose 33.8% in constant currency to $330.5 billion.

The gap between MTN's telecom and fintech customer bases, however, highlights the challenge the business faces. Hundreds of millions of mobile customers do not automatically translate into users of payments, lending, insurance or other financial products, which is why the group is leaning on its telecom footprint and distribution rather than building a fintech business from scratch.

In Nigeria, MTN is bringing in technology from Alibaba, a technology and commerce giant; Alipay, a Chinese digital payments platform; and Ant International Group, as it builds out its fintech proposition and competes in a market already crowded with digital financial-services companies.

"There are many fintech businesses there (Nigeria), MoneyPoint, OPay, PalmPay and others, but there is room for quite a lot of players, and we see a lot of growth there," Mupita told TechCabal.

The strategy also points to a bigger change in what MTN wants its fintech business to become. The company is moving beyond payments and into lending, which Mupita described as the major future opportunity in advanced financial services. The International Finance Corporation (IFC) estimates the micro, small and medium enterprises financing gap in Sub-Saharan Africa at $331 billion, including $32.2 billion in Nigeria alone.

The group currently works with commercial partner banks that use its customer data to assess whether customers qualify for credit, but Mupita said the company intends to look internally. "But increasingly, you're going to see us lending off our own balance sheet," he stated.

That would mark a significant evolution for a telecom operator whose financial-services business has historically been built around payments and partnerships with banks. It also introduces a new set of risks, particularly credit risk, as MTN takes greater responsibility for loans issued through its ecosystem.

"That's something we're going to do incrementally because, obviously, it comes with risk," Mupita acknowledged.

MTN's latest results show that fintech growth is coming from a portfolio of markets, with Nigeria and Ghana among the strongest contributors, while Côte d'Ivoire, Cameroon, Uganda and Rwanda are also adding momentum. The group said its broader portfolio helped offset temporary challenges in individual markets.

Mupita added that the company also has a growing merchant network to support the expansion. It ended the period with 2.3 million merchants, while advanced services, including lending, payments, remittances and insurance, grew 31.8% in constant currency.

That makes the 30 million-customer target less about launching another standalone fintech product and more about exploiting an asset MTN already owns: its massive telecom distribution network, with Nigeria positioned as the clearest test case for how far that model can scale.

Source: TechCabal