February 2026: 338 million wallet transactions against 6.7 million at Mozambique’s ATMs

February 28, 2026

In the shortest month of the year the wallet rails ran faster per day than in January, while the machine network kept shrinking.

Mozambique’s e-money institutions handled 338.0 million transactions worth MT224.5bn in the 28 days of February 2026, or 12.1 million a day. January had run at 10.4 million a day. Over the same weeks the country’s 1,322 ATMs recorded 6.7 million operations, one for every 51 wallet transactions.

The gap explains where a retailer should put its effort. Cards and cash machines are a shrinking, expensive rail that serves a minority; the wallet on a basic phone is the rail that reaches everyone else. February’s Banco de Moçambique figures show both trends running in the same month.

Subtracting January from the running total

February alone: 87.1 million deposits, 48.3 million withdrawals, 174.4 million transfers and 28.2 million payments.

The 2026 column in the March summary is cumulative to the end of February. Take away the January column and the month’s own numbers emerge: deposits worth MT65.1bn, withdrawals MT40.2bn, transfers MT115.6bn and service payments MT3.6bn. The derivation is arithmetic on official tables, and the bank does not publish a separate February line.

The average transaction came to MT664, up from MT620 in January. Deposits averaged MT747 and withdrawals MT833. Payments for services stayed near MT127, which is the price of an airtime top-up or a small utility bill rather than a shop purchase.

Transfers took 51.6% of the month’s count and 51.5% of its value, so half the wallet economy is money changing hands between people and accounts, not paying for goods. That share is the ceiling on what a shop can hope to capture, because a transfer to a relative never touches a till.

Machines lose ground to agents

ATMs fell from 1,388 to 1,322 in a month; agents rose by only 3,146.

The banca electrónica workbook for 2026 counts 1,322 ATMs in February against 1,388 in January, and 31,397 POS terminals against 32,480. ATM withdrawals numbered 6.39 million worth MT21.8bn, an average of about MT3,407, more than four times the MT833 of a wallet withdrawal. POS terminals took 5.99 million payments worth MT15.8bn.

The economics explain the divergence. An ATM is a fixed asset that a bank must stock with cash, service and insure, so a bank closes the ones that do not pay. An agent is a person with a shopfront, a phone and float, who costs the operator a commission only when a customer transacts. The agent network reached 457,813 in February from 454,667, the smallest monthly addition since the year began.

Accounts drift lower for a second month

24,796,551 e-money subscriptions, down 209,991, while individual bank accounts rose by 27,783.

The subscriber proxy has now fallen from 25,473,998 in December, a cumulative loss of 677,447 or 2.7%, while individual bank accounts, men and women together, reached 6,406,472. The bank series has climbed each month of the year so far. Wallet accounts, in contrast, respond to operators’ housekeeping as much as to demand.

Interoperability, announced by the Banco de Moçambique in 2022 as the Club of Mozambique reported, lets a customer of one wallet send to a number on another. That lowers the cost of holding a single account and may reduce duplicate wallets, but the bank has not tied the February movement to any cause.

What a merchant does on Monday

Accept all three wallets and plan cash logistics around agents.

Set up merchant acceptance on M-Pesa, e-Mola and mKesh together, since a customer can now pay from any of them. Tell staff that a typical wallet payer brings under MT700, and price small-ticket promotions to that figure.

Where a business still depends on an ATM for its cash supply, map the nearest agents and their float hours now. March’s figures, due in the April summary, will show whether the machine count keeps falling.

Card acceptance keeps its place for larger baskets: the average POS payment was near MT2,640 against MT664 for the wallet, so a business selling fuel, furniture or building supplies may want both rails, with the wallet as the default for everything under a thousand meticais.