MTN Nigeria Migrates MoMo to New Platform as Fintech Revenue Falls 26%
MTN Nigeria has moved its MoMo mobile money service to a new platform as the company's fintech revenue continued to fall 26 percent despite strong transaction volume growth, signalling a significant inflection point for Africa's largest telco's digital finance business. The migration is being watched as a test of whether the platform overhaul can close the monetisation gap identified in recent results.
MoMo's Real Problem: the Alipay+ upgrade solves the wrong thing
Transaction volumes up 69% quarter-on-quarter, wallet balances quadrupled, a shiny new platform built with Ant International. The infrastructure story looks good.
But the numbers underneath tell you what actually drives MTN's fintech income: airtime lending. Xtratime — letting customers borrow airtime and repay later — collapsed fintech revenue from ₦64.2 billion in Q1 to ₦13 billion in Q2 when regulators forced a suspension. The Alipay+ migration didn't touch that problem.
A faster, more reliable MoMo platform is genuinely useful. But if one regulator pause on a single lending product can erase 80% of your fintech revenue in a quarter, better infrastructure isn't the fix — it's decoration on a fragile foundation.
2 sources
- MTN Nigeria moves MoMo to new platform as fintech revenue falls 26% · techcabal.com · T1
- MTN Nigeria’s airtime and data lending revenue rebounds with 78.5% surge in Q3’26 · technext24.com · T2