April 2026: wallet transfers pass 200m a month as the average cash-out hits MT855

April 30, 2026

Wordless fine-line illustration: A cash-in-transit box and a phone placed on either arm of a balance scale at a village kiosk, the phone side rising while the box side carries a taller stack of notes

Cash-out tickets run 11% above cash-in tickets, and that gap sets how much float an agent must carry.

Mozambique’s mobile wallets recorded 204.0 million transfers in April 2026, crossing 200 million in a single month, and total operations of 383.1 million worth MT259.6bn, according to the Banco de Moçambique monthly statistical summary. Adjusted for a 30-day month, activity ran at 12.8 million operations a day, up 8.4% on March.

The number to watch inside the total is the pair of averages that sit either side of a cash counter: the average deposit was MT768 and the average withdrawal MT855. Money leaves wallets in larger pieces than it enters them, and that asymmetry is the working constraint on every agent in the network.

April’s ledger

Every operation grew, and payments for services stayed the smallest line.

Deposits were 96.2 million operations worth MT73.8bn. Withdrawals were 53.6 million worth MT45.9bn. Transfers were 204.0 million worth MT136.2bn, an average of MT668. Payments for services came to 29.3 million operations and MT3.7bn, an average of MT126, the lowest ticket of any month so far in 2026.

Against March, operations rose 5.0% and value 5.7%. Cash entering wallets outran cash leaving by MT28.0bn, a ratio of 1.61 by value, in line with the earlier months of the year.

Bank cards moved the other way from wallets. The card count in the same summary rose to 3,643,996 from 3,581,441 in March, a gain of 62,555, most of it in debit cards at 3,381,657. A card base that is one-seventh the size of the wallet base still added accounts, which is consistent with customers adding a card alongside a wallet rather than choosing between them.

Why the two averages matter

An agent buys and sells e-float, and the two legs are not the same size.

Consider what happens at an agent’s counter. On a deposit the customer hands over notes and the agent’s e-float falls by the same amount as the wallet credit; on a withdrawal the agent hands out notes and recovers float. If withdrawals average MT855 and deposits MT768, every withdrawal empties the till of 11% more notes than each deposit refills.

In April there were 53.6 million withdrawals against 96.2 million deposits. Notes flowed in faster than they flowed out in aggregate, but the bunching matters. A rural agent who serves salary day sees a run of withdrawals with few deposits, and needs a cash top-up before the queue does.

The wallet issuers cannot see this from their side alone. They know how many withdrawals each agent processed, and they know the agent’s float balance; what they need is a forecast of withdrawal size by day of the month, which the April data supports. A MT87 gap on the average ticket looks small until it is multiplied by 53.6 million.

After the SPIM launch

The official launch in Matola came in mid-March; April is the first full month after it.

The Banco de Moçambique launched the system officially on 16 March in Matola, listing 15 commercial banks, 12 microbanks and the three wallet issuers as participants, with access by website, app and USSD, the phone-menu channel that needs no internet. Daily limits are MT200,000 for individuals and MT500,000 for legal entities, per the same report.

The Jornal Económico account of the start-up describes the same set of participants. April’s transfer count is the first that spans a complete month of free instant interbank transfers for individuals, and it rose 6.4% in total on March, or 9.8% per day, from 6.19 million to 6.80 million transfers a day.

What operators do with it

Plan agent cash around withdrawal size, not deposit count.

A distributor, supermarket chain or fuel retailer that hosts wallet agents at its tills should set cash-float limits using the withdrawal average, currently MT855, and not the deposit average. A store that expects 100 cash-outs on a payday needs about MT85,500 in notes for that queue alone.

The action for a network operator is to publish a daily float dashboard to its agents. The action for a merchant is to stop treating the wallet as a cash-out channel: with transfers above 200 million a month and instant, fee-free bank transfers now available, a QR or merchant-code checkout captures the sale without anyone visiting an agent.