After its competitor Orange, the telecom operator MTN is in the process of creating a payment institution dedicated to financial transactions via mobile in Cameroon.
In an interview published Thursday, August 11 in the public-owned daily Cameroon Tribune , the Minister of Finance, Louis Paul Motaze, reveals: “ Orange Money Cameroon recently obtained its approval, and that of MTN Mobile Money is in the process of instructions to the Bank of Central African States (Beac) and the Central African Banking Commission ( COBAC ) ”.
Thus, like its predecessor, MTN will create a subsidiary which will be authorized to provide, independently, payment services such as deposits, transfers and withdrawals of money, purchases of credits and telephone packages, bill payments, salaries, taxes and duties, collection and collection of funds and receipt of international money transfers.
So far, MTN has just a subsidiary called “Mobile Money Corporation” which is a payment service provider whose size is smaller with a capital of 850 million FCFA. If the monetary institutions that are Cobac and Beac give their discharge to MTN’s application for approval, the structure will have a larger structure in terms of resources and services to be delivered.
Orange Cameroon alone claims 70% of the mobile money market share, with monthly cumulative transactions amounting to 800 billion FCFA in 2020, recalls Invest in Cameroon . At MTN, where this broad market dominance claimed by Orange is taken with a lot of tweezers, officials rather recall that MTN Mobile Money had 5.6 million active customers in the 2nd quarter of 2021, at least 168,000 points of presence at across the country, including 108,000 merchant points and 60,000 distribution points.