MTN Nigeria recoups ₦12.5 billion lost to mobile money glitch as monthly active users grow

MTN Nigeria, one of Nigeria’s largest telecom providers, has recovered over half of the ₦22 billion it lost when its Mobile Money service suffered a glitch in May 2022. The incident, which occurred one week after the launch of the mobile money service, highlights the scale of fraud in Nigeria’s financial services sector.

While ₦12.5 billion ($7.85 million) has been recovered to date, the balance of ₦9.5 billion ($5.97 million) will be absorbed by MTN Nigeria due to a shared services cost agreement between the telco and MoMo service. “MTN Nigeria has fully provided for this amount,” a statement from its 2023 financials said

In Nigeria, MoMo is still gaining adoption, as TechCabal previously reported.

“The development of the business has been slower than anticipated,” said Toriola, MTN Nigeria’s CEO, in the 2023 full-year report.

Delays in regulatory approvals from the Central Bank and the inability of many prospective customers to meet the NIN requirement for Know Your Customer (KYC) were drawbacks to MoMo’s growth.

However, Toriola expressed his satisfaction with the progress in building the MoMo PSB wallet base, and claimed monthly active users increased from 3.3 million in the year to 5.3 million. This growth was supported by 326,000 MoMo agents and 324,000 merchants in its ecosystem.

MoMo PSB is optimistic about growing its reach via consumer education and leveraging its distribution network. The fintech hopes to include the provision of cross-border remittances to boost adoption and monetisation. “We will leverage the momentum from Q4 to accelerate the growth of wallets and adoption of services as we expand our merchant ecosystem,” Toriola added.