MTN Group, Africa’s largest telecommunications company, is exploring banking licences in select markets as it seeks to expand its fintech business and eventually lend directly to customers from its own balance sheet.
The move would give the telecoms giant greater control over its growing lending business, which it currently operates through partnerships with banks, while allowing it to take deposits and use those funds to support lending.
MTN Group CEO Ralph Mupita disclosed the plan on Tuesday while speaking to journalists, as the company continues to pursue new revenue opportunities beyond its traditional telecommunications business.
The group’s fintech expansion comes as its core business continues to perform strongly. MTN reported R218 billion in service revenue in 2025, representing an increase of nearly 25 percent and driven largely by strong performances from its operations in Nigeria and Ghana.
Mupita said MTN is seeing strong growth in what he described as “advanced services” and identified lending as the major growth opportunity for the group’s future.
“The big growth now, which will be the growth of the future, is actually lending.”
MTN is separating its fintech business from telecoms
For some time, MTN Group has been pursuing a structural separation of its fintech operations from its telecommunications business, with the aim of creating standalone financial services businesses that can attract strategic investment and scale independently.
In July 2026, MTN was reported to be finalising the spin-offs of its fintech operations in Nigeria and Uganda as part of a broader restructuring of its mobile-money business. The move is expected to create room for Mastercard and other strategic investors to acquire minority stakes in the businesses.
The group has already completed the process in Ghana. In April, TechMedia Africa reported that MTN Group had completed the structural separation of its mobile money business in Ghana, spinning it off into a standalone fintech entity as part of its broader strategy to scale digital financial services across Africa.
The banking licences being considered in selected markets would take the fintech strategy a step further, allowing MTN to take deposits and gradually use its own balance sheet to provide loans rather than relying entirely on partner banks.
Mupita, however, said the shift would not mean an end to partnerships with 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.”
He said the approach would be selective, focusing on markets with large customer bases and significant funds held in mobile-money wallets, while the transition to balance-sheet lending would be gradual because of the risks involved.
MTN’s fintech business is already generating billions
The push to separate fintech from MTN’s telecommunications operations is being supported by the financial performance of the business, particularly in some of its largest African markets.
In Nigeria, MTN’s fintech business generated N131.6 billion in revenue in the first nine months of 2025, representing a 72.5 percent increase from the same period in 2024. The performance translated to an average of about N43 billion per quarter, or roughly N15 billion monthly.
The business, however, recorded a reversal in the first half of 2026, with revenue falling 7.2 percent year-on-year to N77.17 billion. MTN attributed the decline to the suspension of its airtime and data credit services.
In Ghana, where MTN’s mobile-money operation has now been structurally separated from the telecoms business, Mobile Money revenue increased by 23.3 percent to GHS3.49 billion in the first half of 2026.
The performance has not been uniform across MTN’s markets. In South Africa, MTN’s digital revenue declined by 7.5 percent, while fintech revenue fell by 16.3 percent during the period.
Despite the mixed performance across individual markets, MTN is positioning its fintech business to benefit from the broader expansion of Africa’s digital financial services market, which is projected to generate about $65 billion in annual revenue by 2030.
The planned banking licences would therefore give MTN another route to capture more value from that growth, particularly in lending, while reducing its reliance on traditional banking partners in selected markets.
