Writing · Analysis
MTN's Mobile Money Lead Comes With a Price
Four real options for growing revenue from a user base that's stopped growing, and what each one actually costs.
Ghana's mobile money active-user base plateaued around 26 million from December 2025 through June 2026, even as transaction value kept setting records. That's established. What follows is a different question: given that the easy lever, adding new users, appears mostly used up, what does MTN, which holds roughly 73% of the market, actually have available to defend its position and grow revenue from the users it already has?
This isn't a recommendation. It's an inventory of four real paths, what each one costs, and one documented example of where MTN's ability to charge for any of it already hit a wall.
Four options, and their main tradeoff
| Option | What it is | Main tradeoff |
|---|---|---|
| Squeeze existing users | Expand the lending stack already running on MoMo | Kenya's Fuliza shows shrinking ticket size despite rising volume |
| Capture the entry | Route salary payments directly into wallets via the existing disbursement API | Real adoption is unknown; bank transfer is still the default |
| Sidestep lending | Savings and investment products like IC Wealth | No adoption numbers disclosed; GhanaPay is competing from a fee-free angle |
| Grow the surface | Merchant payments and the Ant International super-app platform | Real execution risk; no announced Ghana launch date |
Squeeze the users already there
MTN already runs a lending stack: XtraBalance, rebranded MoMo Boost in July 2026 by underwriting partner Forms Capital, alongside Qwikloan, SmartLoan, Ahomka Loan, and XpressLoan. Multiple concurrent products, not one evolving lineage. Advance services (lending and payments) revenue reached GH¢2.0bn in Scancom's own FY2025 results, up 55.9% year on year, audited.
The mechanism across these products is broadly the same: an approved credit limit, interest charged only on what's actually drawn rather than the full limit, and automatic repayment the moment funds land back in the wallet.
Kenya's Fuliza, the most mature version of this play anywhere on the continent, shows where it can go. Safaricom's own FY26 results show Fuliza disbursement up 49.3% to KES 1.47 trillion and users up to 17.7 million, but the average amount drawn per transaction fell 9.7% in the same year, to KES 217.9. Growing volume paired with a shrinking typical draw is the standard signature of a lending product spreading into smaller, more habitual use, not necessarily larger financial need. It isn't proof MTN's own lending stack will follow the same path. It's the closest real comparable available for what the risk looks like if it does.
The ceiling on what you can charge
On 25 May 2026, MTN's mobile money subsidiary MMFL texted customers announcing a fee, 0.75% capped at GH¢5, on wallet-to-bank transfers, including transfers between a customer's own wallet and their own bank account, effective 1 June. The Bank of Ghana suspended it within 24 hours, citing consumer protection. It has not been reintroduced.
A separate GhIPSS interoperability channel already charges 0.75% capped at GH¢7.5 for a similar transfer. MMFL wasn't inventing a wallet-to-bank fee. It was pricing one on its own gateway for the first time, and was stopped inside a day.
That matters for reading everything else here: whatever MTN does next, direct pricing power over money leaving the wallet system has a demonstrated, fast-acting regulatory limit.
Capture the entry, not just the exit
If the exit is capped, the alternative is not needing one. MTN's own Mobile Money API, extended to Ghana between 2019 and 2022, already supports bulk disbursement, including direct salary payment, straight into wallets. Money paid this way never touches a bank account, so a wallet-to-bank fee is never in play, because there's nothing to charge one on.
The honest limit: bank-to-wallet transfers were roughly 7% of total mobile money transaction value per Bank of Ghana's 2024 breakdown, and general reporting on payroll in Ghana still describes bank transfer as the default for formal salary payment, with mobile money used more for smaller or remote-worker payments. No published figure exists for how much of Ghana's actual payroll currently moves through MoMo directly rather than through banks. That's a real gap in what's knowable right now, not a reason to dismiss the option. The capability already exists. What's unclear is how much of it is actually being used.
Sidestep lending
MTN launched IC Wealth on MoMo in mid-2026, an SEC-regulated investment product run with IC Asset Managers. No adoption numbers have been disclosed.
GhanaPay, the bank-led interoperable wallet, is approaching a version of the same territory from the other side: transfers are free, and the product leans on interest-bearing savings as its differentiator, a feature standard MoMo wallets don't carry. Two different institutions, the same underlying bet, that the next round of growth in mobile money looks like managing money people already have rather than moving money they don't.
This path avoids the debt-trap comparison Fuliza raises entirely. Its risk runs the other way: undisclosed adoption could mean a product that launched quietly and never found traction, just as easily as one that's still ramping.
Grow the surface, not just the wallet
MoMoPay already charges tiered merchant fees, 0.25% under GH¢5,000, a flat GH¢12.50 above. In June 2026, MTN announced a super-app partnership with Ant International, rolling out Nigeria first with no announced Ghana date.
Less speculatively: MoMo already handles free bill payments for utilities, school fees, and TV subscriptions, and offers a virtual Mastercard that bridges wallet balances to card-only online payments, the kind international subscription services often require. Whether that bridge is how most Ghanaians already pay for something like Netflix, or an underused capability, isn't something that could be confirmed either way here.
Platform and super-app plays carry real execution risk. Vodacom's VodaPay is the standard cautionary example of a telecom-led super-app that launched with ambition and underperformed it. Ant's unannounced Ghana timeline means this path, more than any other here, is a bet on execution that hasn't started yet.
The competitive backdrop
None of this happens in isolation. Telecel Ghana returned to profitability in 2025 with revenue up roughly 30%, funded in part by nearly doubling its network sites from 5,000 to 9,000, and its mobile money product holds an estimated 23% share against MTN's 73%, a comparison worth making carefully, since what a percentage is measured against changes what it actually says: MTN's 73% is a share of active mobile money accounts specifically, not of telecom subscribers generally, and the two produce very different numbers.
GhanaPay is pulling from the fee-free, bank-led direction described above. And GhIPSS's own interoperability infrastructure means almost nothing MTN builds stays exclusively MTN's for long. The wallet-to-bank episode is itself proof: a comparable transfer was already priced elsewhere before MTN tried to price its own version.
Conclusion
Four real paths, running at once at different stages of maturity: a scaled lending stack with a documented risk pattern behind it, a payment rail with a regulator-proven ceiling, an unproven savings product, and a platform bet that hasn't started in Ghana yet. The clearest fact available is the negative one. On 25 May 2026, the easiest version of "charge more for what already happens" got shut down within a day. Whatever grows revenue per user from here has to be something other than that.