Written by Alvyn Ulrish Shad Savrimuthu
The conversation around mobile money in Africa has matured. It is no longer enough to talk about getting people into the financial system. The harder, more important question is what happens once they are in it. On 29 April 2025, the Mauritius Africa FinTech Hub (MAFH) brought together some of the continent’s most active voices in fintech to unpack exactly that, in a focused session titled Inclusive Innovation & Mobile Money 2.0.
The panel featured Jerome Benoit, Innovation Lead at FinClub; Dr. Patrick Saidu Conteh, CEO of the Africa Fintech Network; Sandeep Chagger, Group COO at Peach Payments; Caleb J. Samy, Product Lead at blink by Emtel; and Florent Masson, CEO of MIPS. The discussion was sharp, grounded in real experience, and refreshingly honest about how much work remains to be done.
Setting the Stage, From Payments to Compounding Impact
To set the scene, Jerome Benoit, Innovation Lead at FinClub, opened the session with a presentation mapping the evolution of mobile money from a single product into a layered ecosystem. His argument was simple and well-evidenced: the progression from payments to microfinance to full mobile banking is not linear, it is compounding. “When the right infrastructure is in place, combined with strong enablers like mobile banking and digital payments,” he noted, “adoption doesn’t just increase, it compounds”. The data he presented made that point viscerally. IPS transactions in Mauritius grew from approximately 1.5 million monthly in August 2019 to nearly 12 billion in monthly transaction value by December 2025, representing a compounded annual growth rate of over 300%. The implication, as Benoit framed it, was clear. “Access is no longer enough. Impact is the new frontier, and that impact will be driven by interoperable systems, resilient infrastructure, and ecosystem-led financial services”.
Redefining What Inclusion Actually Means
The session opened with a foundational question: what does financial inclusion look like in measurable terms?
Dr. Patrick Saidu Conteh framed it clearly. Inclusion, he argued, is no longer about whether someone holds a bank account or a mobile wallet. The bar has moved. “It’s no longer about access to a wallet or a bank account,” he said, “it’s the ability of everyone in the continent to have a full range of services.” That means credit, insurance, and the capacity to make meaningful investment decisions. By that measure, the gap remains significant. “In excess of 300 million Africans are still financially excluded”, and that figure sits at the intersection of both a financial and an economic challenge.
On the question of how to define success, Caleb Samy of blink by Emtel offered a perspective rooted in local reality. Mauritius entered the mobile money conversation at a very different starting point than markets like Kenya. The population was already banked, the infrastructure already existed, and measuring progress against M-Pesa was never the right benchmark. “Our reality was really very different”, Caleb Samy noted, and what matters is growth measured against your own roadmap and context. “Where we are today in Mauritius,” he added, “it’s at that stage where we can leverage and go towards that new step”, building an ecosystem well beyond basic payments.
Interoperability: Technically Possible, Commercially Unfinished
The panel’s most substantive exchange centred on interoperability. Dr. Conteh, drawing on his experience at continental level with the Africa Fintech Network, identified three non-negotiable priorities for making cross-border mobile money commercially viable.
The first is convergence of rules. Africa’s 54 countries, with over 40 currencies and as many regulatory frameworks, create a system where duplicated licensing, KYC requirements, and AML compliance processes make cross-border operations prohibitively expensive. “License requirements are duplicated,” Dr. Conteh observed, “so if I’m in Mauritius, I need to go to the neighboring country, I have to repeat the license process.” Passporting of licences and common AML/CFT standards are not aspirational luxuries. They are prerequisites. The good news is that the policy architecture is beginning to take shape, with the African Continental Free Trade Area’s digital trade protocols now providing a framework for exactly this kind of harmonisation.
The second priority is shared infrastructure. The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System is already connecting over 19 countries and 150 commercial banks, but cross-border flows are still largely routed through multiple intermediaries using the US dollar as a medium of exchange. Dr. Conteh was direct about what the target state looks like: “a mobile wallet speaks to a bank account, speaks to a FinTech platform”, not as an aspiration but as an operational requirement. Investment in interoperable digital IDs and shared fraud monitoring tools at a regional level is equally critical to making that vision real.
The third is governance and incentives. Right now, the largest players in the market have a rational commercial incentive to keep customers inside closed loops. “The big players make business by keeping customers inside closed loops, or by treating cross-border payments as a premium service”, Dr. Conteh noted. That dynamic, while understandable, shuts out fintechs and underutilises the very rails that have been built. More inclusive governance frameworks for national switches and pan-African payment platforms are needed so that MNOs, banks, and fintechs can compete on something closer to equal terms.
Sandeep Chagger, Group COO at Peach Payments, brought a payment infrastructure lens to the same question. Operating across 15 African countries, Peach Payments sees the fragmentation problem up close. “You take any country, there are at least 10 or 15 alternate payment methods in addition to card”, he said, and any business attempting regional scale has to individually integrate into each of them. The aggregation layer, companies like Peach Payments and MIPS, exists precisely to reduce that friction. Chagger was equally direct about where leadership on innovation actually sits. “Africa is literally spearheading this entire innovation”, he argued, pointing to how the continent leapfrogged from cash to mobile money entirely at a time when Europe and the US still wrestle with penetration.
MSMEs: The Backbone That Finance Keeps Failing
The second panel shifted to small and medium enterprises, the segment that carries the most economic weight on the continent and receives the least institutional support. “The SME financing gap in Africa is in excess of $300 billion”, Dr. Conteh stated plainly. That is not a market inefficiency. It is a structural failure.
Dr. Conteh laid out what coordinated reform would need to look like. Policy mandates must be explicit, with SME financing targets embedded deliberately in national financial inclusion strategies rather than treated as peripheral. Public and development capital must be deployed to de-risk rather than replace private lending. “Well-designed credit guarantee schemes that are accessible to banks, to SACOs, digital lenders can help to shift or share the risk on MSME portfolios”, he explained, encouraging lenders to move into segments they would otherwise avoid. Legal and data infrastructure around movable collateral registries and modern insolvency frameworks must be modernised, and the SMEs themselves need support in building the record-keeping capabilities that make them lendable in the first place.
Sandeep Chagger illustrated how transactional data is already changing the credit equation. Payment companies, including Peach Payments, sit on datasets that reveal transaction frequency, volume, seasonality, chargeback rates, and refund behaviour. “These data points combined can give you a credit score on an immediate basis”, he explained. The speed of that shift is striking. “You’re giving credit in less than one minute or a few seconds”, once the relevant identifiers are in place. The move from collateral-based to data-driven credit is not theoretical. It is already happening, and Peach Payments is squarely in the middle of it.
Caleb Samy of blink by Emtel brought the merchant-level perspective, grounded in years of direct field experience. “When you go to a small merchant or a dholl puri seller, there is a reality that they are facing on the field”, he said. “It’s about having notification on time, having a system where they are able to access their money, to have visibility, and to accept payment”. For MSMEs, trust and simplicity are the product. Cost sensitivity is real, but not the whole story. blink by Emtel began onboarding merchants at scale in 2020, in the immediate aftermath of COVID, when QR-code payments were still being explained from scratch. That work has paid off. The education phase is largely done, and the challenge now is deepening the relationship and expanding what the platform can offer.
Orchestration at the Merchant Layer, Where the Rails Meet Reality
Before the panel closed, Florent Masson, CEO of MIPS, brought the conversation down to the merchant layer, offering a perspective he described as sitting on top of the rails everyone else had been building. MIPS operates a payment orchestration platform across the Indian Ocean, connecting banks, wallets, and card schemes into a single acceptance layer, with a stated purpose of removing the complexity between a merchant and their revenue. Masson was direct about what the next phase actually requires on the ground. “Before we build new layers like lending or embedded finance, we need to fix something more fundamental,” he said, “one merchant, one integration, one reconciled ledger”. His framing of where mobile money is heading was equally sharp. “Mobile money is the last generation where we talk about payments,” he argued, “the next step is invisible infrastructure, where the transaction disappears and the data becomes a product”.
The Broader Signal
What the webinar made clear, across both panels, is that the infrastructure phase of African fintech is not finished, but the conversation has decisively moved on. The next chapter is about what gets built on top of what already exists. Embedded finance, AI-driven credit scoring, interoperable wallets, and inclusive governance frameworks are not future concepts. They are active projects in markets across the continent, being built by precisely the kind of organisations represented on this panel.
For financial institutions, fintechs, and policymakers looking to understand where the market is heading, the signal is consistent. Access was the first chapter. Impact is the one being written now.
The Mauritius Africa FinTech Hub is the official FinTech association of Mauritius, driving the development of FinTech across the island and the broader African continent. Its mission is to enable a digital economy, support financial inclusion, and build a connected pan-African ecosystem for entrepreneurs, institutions, governments, and innovators.
Learn more at www.mauritiusfintech.org
