MTN records 39.3% decline in fintech customers in H1 2023

MTN Nigeria has reported a 39.4% decline in its fintech customers for the half-year 2023, bringing its users down to 7 million at the end of June.

The company disclosed this in its H1 2023 financial results just released. According to MTN, out of the 7 million fintech customers, 3.1 million are MoMo wallet users, representing 44% of its total fintech customers.

Despite the decline in customers, MTN said it recorded a 7.8% growth in fintech revenue. Its fintech revenue for the first six months of this year stood at N43.6 billion compared with N40.4 billion recorded during the same period last year.

Impacted by a cash shortage

Explaining the reasons for the company’s fintech business poor performance in the period under review, MTN’s Chief Executive Officer, Mr Karl Toriola, said:

• “Our fintech user base was impacted by the effects of the cash shortages on over-the-counter (OTC) transactions during Q1. As a result, our active user base was down by 39.3% YoY to 7.0 million, of which approximately 3.1 million represent active MoMo PSB wallets.”

That notwithstanding, Toriola said the company now has a total of 227,000 MoMo agents that are taking its services closer to its customers across Nigeria. He said the company had also onboarded 36,000 merchants in its ecosystem.  

Fintech priority

Toriola noted that the fintech business remains a crucial priority for MTN as it continues to put structures in place to support the execution of its growth strategy and scale the fintech ecosystem in line with our Ambition 2025 strategy. In that regard, he said the company would ramp up its fintech campaigns to create more awareness.

• “During H1, we completed reopening the NIBSS interface for both inbound and outbound transfers, strengthened our control systems, and introduced the basic version of our MoMo app. We saw momentum in the ecosystem with fintech transaction volume up by 67.1% YoY.
• “We are now focused on driving commercial activities – consumer education and awareness, leveraging the full strength of our distribution network to grow the active wallets and scale the agent and merchant ecosystem while preparing for the rollout of our super app with a bouquet of services for our customers,” he said.

Meanwhile, MTN recorded 49.9% growth in its digital revenue for the period under review. According to the company, this was bolstered by revenue from rich media services and content VAS.

Toriola said the digital revenue growth was also supported by the adoption of digital products and the development of the active base, up 56.6% to 14 million.

• “In H1, we brought Amazon Prime Video and Apple Music to our customers, expanding our rich media services portfolio.
• Ayoba, our instant messaging platform, continued to gain traction with the addition of over 2 million users, bringing the monthly active users to 7.2 million in H1.
• Furthermore, service revenue from the enterprise business rose by 48.5%, led by the mobile and fixed connectivity services and underpinned by onboarding new customers across all segments,” MTN Nigeria’s CEO stated.