PawaPay, a UK-based fintech that provides mobile payments solutions to African businesses, has said it processed three billion mobile money transactions, reaching its latest billion in less than nine months and doubling its daily transaction volume to five million payments.<\/p>\n
Africa\u2019s mobile money economy was worth $1.4 trillion in 2025<\/a> and has long been associated with financial inclusion and cash exchange. Increasingly, however, businesses are using mobile money to collect payments, pay customers, and operate across multiple markets.<\/p>\n PawaPay\u2019s latest milestone offers a glimpse into this growing trend. The company, founded in 2020, says it connects large and small businesses to nearly 50 mobile operators across 20 African countries through a single API, allowing merchants to accept and disburse payments without building separate integrations for each market. Since launch, PawaPay said it has processed more than \u20ac10 billion ($11.63 billion) in payments.<\/p>\n \u201cMobile money, as the principal means of digital payments on the continent, is growing year on year,\u201d Jamie Steell, the company\u2019s chief operating officer, told TechCabal in an interview. \u201cIt\u2019s like 20% up year on year consistently.\u201d<\/p>\n Steell attributed the growth to a combination of demographic and technological factors, including a young population, falling smartphone costs<\/a>, cheaper internet access, and the rapid digitisation of commerce.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is a digital environment growth that is happening, and that is driving growth of all our merchants that we see come onto our pipes,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n For much of the last two decades, mobile money\u2019s growth was powered by person-to-person transfers and remittances. Today, a growing share of activity is coming from businesses using mobile money to collect and send payments across multiple African markets.<\/p>\n More than $2.1 trillion flowed through mobile money globally in 2025, with merchant payments the fastest-growing use case, rising by 42% year-on-year to $155 billion, according to GSMA<\/a>, the global industry body for telecom operators.<\/p>\n \u201cMore merchants now offer mobile money as a payment channel,\u201d GSMA<\/a> said in its latest State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money. Monthly active merchants rose by 59% in 2025.\u00a0<\/p>\n Yet while transaction volumes continue to rise, mobile money remains largely a payments tool rather than a store of value. Most users still cash out funds instead of keeping money within mobile money ecosystems.<\/p>\n According to GSMA<\/a>, cash was the dominant way funds entered and left mobile money networks in 2025, although transfers between banks and mobile wallets were becoming increasingly common.<\/p>\n Steell believes the next phase of growth will come when users begin treating mobile money wallets as primary financial accounts.<\/p>\n \u201cIn five years, mobile money wallets have to become where the money goes into and stays there because of the use cases for that, from merchant payments to savings to investments,\u201d he said. \u201cThe money will stay in that ecosystem, and the ecosystem will exponentially grow.\u201d<\/p>\n The strongest growth on PawaPay\u2019s network is coming from Ghana, Tanzania, Cameroon and Uganda, according to Steell. That aligns with GSMA\u2019s data<\/a>, which showed that East Africa accounted for roughly three-quarters of global merchant payment growth in 2025.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are really interested in growing the kind of volume right the way across Africa in all the markets that we are servicing,\u201d he said. \u201cThankfully, all of them are on the up.\u201d<\/p>\n The company currently processes payments on behalf of a limited number of merchants in Nigeria and is not yet operating as a full aggregator in the market. Still, Steell said the company is considering expanding its presence.<\/p>\n \u201cNigeria is a huge market. We are not ignorant to the opportunity that exists in Nigeria,\u201d he said. \u201cExpanding our operation there is definitely something that we are interested in doing.\u201d<\/p>\n