April 2026: Mozambique’s wallets took in MT28bn more cash than they paid out

April 30, 2026

Wordless fine-line illustration: A market trader's cloth bag of banknotes emptied into a wooden till at dusk while a thin line of light runs from the till up a pole toward a distant glass bank tower

Deposits outran withdrawals by MT28.0bn in April, the widest surplus of the year, and the money has to sit somewhere.

In April 2026 customers of Mozambique’s three e-money institutions put MT73.8bn of cash into wallets through 96.2 million deposits and took out MT45.8bn through 53.6 million withdrawals. The difference, MT28.0bn, is the widest monthly cash surplus of the year: January’s was MT22.1bn, February’s MT24.9bn and March’s MT25.4bn.

Every metical of that surplus is a claim on an operator, and the rules say it must be matched by real money held elsewhere. For a brand selling to households the surplus also says something simpler: Mozambicans are choosing to keep cash inside the wallet rather than take it back out.

Deriving April from the running total

Month-by-month lines come from subtracting one cumulative column from the next.

The 2026 column in the May summary reads to the end of April. Deducting the March figures leaves April alone: deposits of MT73.8bn, withdrawals of MT45.8bn, transfers of MT136.2bn on 204.0 million operations, and service payments of MT3.7bn on 29.3 million. The month’s total was 383.1 million transactions worth MT259.6bn.

Value deposited divided by value withdrawn stood at 1.61. Across 2025 the same ratio was 1.54, using the annual totals of MT744.6bn in deposits and MT483.7bn in withdrawals. The direction is stable and the gap is widening slowly, so April is not a one-month spike.

Where a cash surplus goes

Electronic money is issued at face value against funds that sit in a bank.

When a customer hands MT1,000 to an agent, the operator issues MT1,000 of electronic money and the funds are meant to sit in a fiduciary account at a bank. A proposal from the Banco de Moçambique, as Diário Económico reported in April 2025, would keep customer money apart from the operator’s own and give the central bank real-time sight of those accounts, alongside own funds of at least 2% of e-money in circulation.

A monthly surplus of MT28.0bn therefore means either that e-money in circulation grew or that it was spent on goods paid outside the wallet system. The bank’s tables do not say which. What they show is that agents received far more cash than they paid out, so they had to move surplus banknotes to a bank branch or to a wholesaler, and they carried the security risk and the queueing cost of doing so.

Agents rebalance, accounts pause

476,715 agents, up 9,093 in the month, against an account count that added 24,272.

The agent network grew far faster than the subscriber count in April. Subscriptions stood at 25,322,951, a rise of only 24,272 on March, while individual bank accounts, men and women together, reached 6,476,212, up 27,963. Agents are being added faster than users, which points to a densifying network, not a widening customer base.

April was also the second month under Aviso n.º 1/GBM/2026, the instant-payment rulebook the Banco de Moçambique issued on 25 February. Because individuals can move money between bank and wallet without charge, a trader can sweep a day’s takings from wallet to bank account with no fee, which would show up as withdrawals only if the money were taken out as cash.

The scale of informal commerce behind these numbers was put into words by Vodacom Mozambique’s chief executive, who told the Club of Mozambique in May 2024 that M-Pesa’s volume is largely driven by the informal sector. That description fits the surplus: a market trader banking takings into a wallet at the end of the day produces exactly this deposit-heavy profile.

What a supplier or lender does with it

Wallet statements are a record of trading that few Mozambican businesses have on paper.

A wholesaler that sells to informal retailers can ask customers for wallet statements as proof of turnover before granting a first credit line of, say, one week’s stock. A lender can read a steady deposit pattern as cash-flow evidence where no bank account exists.

Brands should also plan promotions around wallet top-up days and agent hours, since the customer’s spendable money now lives in the wallet. Watch May’s release for whether the deposit surplus holds above MT28bn.