July 2025: Mozambique’s mobile wallets logged 324m transactions worth MT218.8bn

July 31, 2025

Wallet traffic hit a year high while card terminals shrank, and the money is moving as transfers rather than purchases.

Mozambican wallets recorded 324.0 million transactions worth MT218.8bn in July 2025, according to Banco de Moçambique’s electronic money statistics. That is 39% more operations and 45% more value than January’s 232.9 million and MT150.6bn, and it made July the busiest month of the year to that point in volume, at a time when the country’s stock of card terminals was falling.

The composition carries the decision-grade signal. Transfers between wallets and to other people accounted for 157.7 million operations and MT108.7bn. Payments for services, the channel a merchant or a utility cares about, managed 25.6 million operations and MT3.0bn. Adoption is no longer the constraint. Turning wallet traffic into commerce is.

Four channels, four ticket sizes

A transfer averages MT689, a service payment MT117, and that gap is the commercial opportunity.

The July table breaks the total into four operations. Deposits, where a customer hands cash to an agent for wallet credit, came to 89.1 million operations and MT65.7bn. Withdrawals, the reverse, were 51.5 million and MT41.4bn. Transfers reached 157.7 million and MT108.7bn, and payments for services 25.6 million and MT3.0bn. The figures sit in the Instituições de Moeda Electrónica 2025 workbook that the central bank updates monthly.

Dividing value by count, on our arithmetic, gives an average deposit of MT738, an average withdrawal of MT803, an average transfer of MT689 and an average service payment of MT117. Withdrawals run largest because people cash out in lumps. Service payments run smallest because they are the small recurring bills that wallets now carry, bought in many small bites.

Where the float sits

Deposits outran withdrawals by MT24.4bn in July, so more cash went into wallets than came out.

Follow one deposit through the system. A customer gives cash to an agent, who debits an electronic float balance held with the operator, and the customer’s wallet is credited the same amount. Electronic money of this kind is normally issued against matching funds held at commercial banks, which is why the operators and the banking system stay tied together even when the customer never opens a bank account.

Subtracting July’s withdrawals from its deposits leaves MT24.4bn of net cash converted into wallet balances. Cash went in faster than it came out, a pattern consistent with wages and family remittances landing on phones. It also means agents ended the month long on cash and short on float, and rebalancing that inventory is a daily cost that the monthly statistical summary does not show but the agent count does.

Terminals fall while agents multiply

Card acceptance is shrinking as the agent network passes 384,000 outlets.

Between the June and July returns, point-of-sale terminals fell from 34,877 to 33,357 and ATMs from 1,378 to 1,364, according to the August edition of the same summary. Over the same month agents rose from 382,844 to 384,878 and wallet subscribers from 23.03 million to 23.06 million. Bank accounts stood at about 6.33 million on the summary’s own split by gender, so each bank account is matched by roughly 3.6 wallet subscribers, though some people hold more than one wallet.

The central bank’s financial inclusion indicators for the first quarter had already flagged the direction: access points up 10.3% between December 2024 and March 2025, led by a 12% rise in electronic money agents. The Relatório de Inclusão Financeira 2025 records the 2024 base: 315,005 non-bank agents and 35,486 POS terminals.

What a merchant or lender does with this

Add the wallet checkout, and price it against a MT117 basket.

For a retailer, utility or school that still takes cash or cards only, the July data is a reach argument. The customer base that transacts 324 million times a month lives on wallets, and the terminal fleet that once served them lost 1,520 units in a single month. A wallet payment option takes the terminal out of the equation, because the agent, not the merchant, carries the cash-in and cash-out.

The small ticket is the trap. At MT117 per service payment, a fee of even a few meticais is a visible share of the bill, so pricing the channel is the real decision. A lender collecting instalments, or an insurer collecting premiums, should pilot collection through wallet transfers, where the MT689 average already shows households moving meaningful sums. Set the pilot against the August count of service payments and keep it only if that line grows.