MTN
Group will apply for a mobile banking licence in Nigeria and plans to launch
the service next year.
Nigeria
announced last month that it would allow telecom companies to provide banking
services, aiming to give millions of Nigerians without bank accounts access to
so-called mobile money services, a policy that has been very successful in
Kenya.
MTN
runs Nigeria’s biggest mobile phone network serving 56 million people, but it
is also involved in a dispute with the authorities after the Central Bank said
it illegally transferred $8.1 billion overseas.
Separately,
it has been slapped with a $2 billion Nigerian tax bill and whether those
issues could influence how quickly MTN secures a licence remains to be seen.
“We
will be applying for a payment service banking licence in Nigeria in the next
month or so, and if all goes according to plan, we will also be launching
Mobile Money in Nigeria probably around Q2 of 2019,” MTN CEO, Rob Shuter, told
a telecoms conference in Cape Town.
Rivals
Airtel, a unit of India’s Bharti Airtel, as well as privately owned Globacom
and 9mobile, are also expected to apply for licences.
The
success in east Africa of M-Pesa, the mobile money unit of Kenya’s Safaricom,
has convinced investors and the industry that financial services is the next
growth area for the telecoms sector which is grappling with falling prices for
basic services.
If
granted a licence, MTN would launch the service in a country where 115 million
Nigerians, or 60 per cent of the population, does not have a bank account,
according to the World Bank.
“It’s
a huge opportunity for MTN,” said Byron Lotter, fund manager at Vestact, which
owns shares in MTN. “The problem is they are being held hostage by this $10.1
billion demand because their business is too big to leave.”
Shuter, who has led MTN since last year, also said the company would relaunch mobile money services in South Africa, two years after canning the service. The company has also bought a music streaming business Simfy, which Shuter said was “Africa’s leading music streaming business.”
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