Vodacom, South Africa’s largest telecom operator by subscribers, has crossed 100 million mobile money customers, a milestone that would have seemed impossible a decade ago for a company whose core business was selling airtime.Â
Its mobile money platforms, which include M-PESA in Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, and Egypt, and VodaPay in South Africa, processed R 9.6 trillion ($525.6 billion) in transactions in the year to March 2026, up by 16.6%. Vodacom’s group revenue hit R 167.7 billion ($9.2 billion), up 10.1%.Â
Fintech now contributes nearly 20% of group service revenue, and Vodacom has revised its 2030 target upward, from 75 million financial services customers to 120 million.
The same story is playing out across the continent, even in smaller markets. MTN Rwanda returned to profit in Q1 2026, posting RWF 10.8 billion ($6.8 million) in profit after tax, reversing a loss from the same period last year. MTN’s mobile money MoMo recorded a 27.6% revenue jump, while mobile money users grew to 5.9 million in Rwanda.Â
Fintech alone now accounts for nearly half of MTN’s total service revenue in Rwanda. The pattern holds everywhere for both telcos: voice revenue is declining, and data and mobile money are the engines. Vodacom CEO Shameel Joosub said it plainly: voice is going the way of SMS.
African telcos built their networks to connect people by phone. They are now processing significant transaction volumes while serving customers that formal banks never reached, pointing to a deeper unlock in mobile money across East and Southern Africa. Yet, telco-owned platforms still haven’t figured out the same scale in West Africa, especially Nigeria, where the numbers are smaller.