March 2025: Mozambican wallets settled 23.2m bills at MT148 each, card terminals MT2,910

March 31, 2025

Two payment rails carried very different baskets in the same 31 days, and the gap tells a merchant which one to build for.

Mozambicans made 23.2 million bill and service payments through e-money wallets in March 2025, worth MT3.42bn, an average of MT148 each. At card terminals the same month recorded 5.30 million payments worth MT15.42bn, an average of MT2,910, nearly twenty times larger.

The two rails serve different baskets. The Banco de Moçambique’s payment statistics show wallets as the channel for small, frequent bills and cards as the channel for larger shops, and March, a 31-day month after a short February, lifted both. A merchant deciding how to take money should start from the size of the typical basket, not from which channel is fashionable.

The wallet rail in a 31-day month

Headline volume jumped 13.3%, but per day it grew only 2.4%.

The three e-money institutions handled 267.7 million transactions worth MT192.43bn in March, against 236.3 million and MT166.54bn in February, according to the central bank’s electronic-money workbook. Spread over the calendar, that is 8.64 million operations a day against 8.44 million, and MT6.21bn a day against MT5.95bn. Most of the jump is three extra days.

Transfers between wallets were the largest line, at 123.0 million operations and MT87.14bn, an average of MT709. Deposits of cash came to 74.4 million (MT60.15bn, average MT808) and withdrawals to 47.1 million (MT41.72bn, average MT885). The agent network stood at 351,921, up 27,124 in a month.

Mechanism: why the tickets differ by a factor of twenty

A wallet payment moves stored value between two balances; a card payment draws on a bank account at a terminal.

A wallet bill payment debits the customer’s e-money balance and credits the biller’s, with no branch, terminal or card involved. That suits repeated small obligations such as airtime, electricity and water top-ups, and it explains an average near MT148. Since 1 July 2022 the three wallets have also been interoperable through SIMOrede, so a payer is no longer tied to the biller’s operator.

A card payment needs a terminal and a funded account, which restricts it to merchants who have bought hardware and shoppers who hold a card. The March electronic-banking workbook counts 35,145 POS terminals and 1,395 ATMs. Both are below the year-end 2024 totals of 35,470 and 1,413 that Club of Mozambique reported in March. The physical bank network is shrinking while the wallet agent count grows.

What the bank channels still carry

Cash machines and internet banking move the big amounts, and phone transfers connect the two worlds.

ATMs dispensed 6.81 million withdrawals worth MT22.68bn, an average of MT3,329, so cash from a bank account is drawn in lumps almost four times the MT885 of a typical wallet cash-out. Internet banking recorded 1.74 million transfers worth MT120.78bn, or about MT69,300 each, which is the corporate and high-income rail. Mobile-banking transfers to phone numbers, the bridge into wallets, were 3.46 million worth MT8.86bn, an average of MT2,565.

Carta de Moçambique reported on 27 March that formal bank accounts reach 30.9% of adults against 68.5% for mobile wallets, which is why the wallet is the only rail many customers can use for a bill. The same report notes that Vodacom’s Txuna instant-credit loans run from MT70 to MT3,500, so even borrowing sits at wallet scale, well under the size of a card basket.

Match the rail to the basket

Below a few hundred meticais, the wallet; above a couple of thousand, a terminal or a bank transfer.

A merchant whose median basket is under MT300 should list wallet payment first and treat cards as a secondary option. One whose median basket is above MT2,000 needs a terminal or a bank transfer, because the wallet’s own average deposit and withdrawal sit under MT900.

Pull three months of till receipts and place each against the MT148 and MT2,910 anchors this quarter. The share that falls between them, roughly MT300 to MT2,000, is where a merchant decides whether to pay for a terminal or teach customers to top up.