MTN Mobile Money Open APIs: Accelerating fintech innovation in Africa
Driving innovation in Africa and generating mobile money transactions and revenue: MTN MoMo APIs have encouraged all third parties, including banks, financial institutions, utilities, money transfer companies, large enterprises, large merchants as well as African start-ups, technology companies, small and medium merchants, mobile wallet providers and fintechs to experiment freely and launch innovative payment cases and applications, promoting innovation in Africa.
The services launched using MTN Open APIs include pay-as-you-go solar, real-time international remittance, pay-as-you-learn low-cost school network, ride-hailing, AgriTech payments, HealthTech payments, savings, credit cooperatives, insurance, crowdfunding and more. These new open API-enabled use cases have increased MTN’s mobile money transactions, resulting in revenue growth.
In 2021, MTN MoMo APIs processed 155 million financial transactions through various partners and use cases. In 2022, from January 2022 to November 2022, MTN MoMo APIs processed over 287.5 million financial transactions, an 85% growth over 2021 transactions.
The open APIs are used by various developers to quickly develop and launch innovative services. The following example shows this. MTN Lonestar Cell Liberia is the latest operator to launch MoMo Open APIs in March 2022. Liberia hosts the popular Liberia Marathon every year in August, where participants register manually at selected locations. This year, the Liberia Marathon digitized the registration process and facilitated mobile payments with MTN Mobile Money. The marathon’s volunteer developer Mr. Kpetermeni Siakor used MoMo Open APIs and integrated MTN MoMo Wallet with Facebook Messenger registration feature. Participants could sign up for the marathon on Facebook messenger and pay the entry fee quickly and securely using the MTN MoMo Wallet. This example shows that open APIs have made it easy for developers to quickly and cost-effectively create services even for short-term use.
MTN has also leveraged open APIs to organize MoMo API Hackathons that boost the rapidly growing startup and technology culture in Africa. MTN and Ericsson successfully organized the first MoMo API Hackathon in Ghana, Uganda, Ivory Coast, Cameroon and Zambia in 2019. In July 2022, MTN announced its second Hackathon, taking place in 10 countries, inviting developers to create a mobile application using MoMo APIs.
The success of MTN Mobile Money Open APIs has been recognized by the industry, including winning the 2022 Global Telecom Awards (Glotel) in the ‘Mobile Financial Services Mastery’ category. The service is also nominated for the GSMA Global Mobile Award (GLOMO) 2023 in the category ‘Best Mobile Innovation for Emerging Markets’.
