May 2026: 663,470 new wallet accounts, but only 3.4 million more transactions

May 31, 2026

Wordless fine-line illustration: A crowded registration table at a roadside kiosk where dozens of blank forms are stacked high, while only a handful of customers actually stand at the counter with folded notes in hand

Mozambique’s wallet base grew by 2.6% in a month while activity grew by 0.9%. New subscriptions are not the same thing as new users.

Mozambique’s e-money institutions added 663,470 accounts in May 2026, taking the subscriber proxy to 25,986,421, the largest one-month gain in the Banco de Moçambique’s 2026 tables. Transactions over the same month rose by only 0.9%, from 383.1 million to 386.5 million, worth MT269.2bn.

Those 3.4 million extra transactions work out at about five for each new account, against an average of roughly fifteen per account per month across the base. The new subscriptions have not yet started behaving like the old ones, and any campaign that counts registrations as customers is counting the wrong thing.

The month behind the headline

May’s own lines: 97.9 million deposits, 52.5 million withdrawals, 207.6 million transfers, 28.5 million payments.

The 2026 column of the June summary is cumulative to the end of May. Subtracting April leaves deposits of MT75.1bn, withdrawals of MT47.1bn, transfers of MT143.3bn and service payments of MT3.6bn. Value rose 3.7% against April while volume rose 0.9%, so the average transaction moved from about MT678 to about MT696.

May has 31 days to April’s 30, so the daily rate actually fell, from 12.8 million transactions a day to 12.5 million. Service payments dipped in count, to 28.5 million from 29.3 million, and fell in absolute terms for the first time this year.

Registered, active, and the gap between

The published account row is a count of subscribers; the bank’s survey work measures use.

The table footnote calls the account line a proxy, the number of subscribers. The Banco de Moçambique’s own financial inclusion strategy cites a demand-side survey that found 83% of the population holding an active e-money account in 2022, with 88% among urban adults and 81% among rural adults, a gender gap of 90.8% for men against 84.3% for women, as set out in the ENIF 2025-2031 document.

Active use and registration counts come from different instruments. A subscription becomes an active account only when its holder deposits, sends or pays, and the monthly summary cannot show how many of May’s 663,470 have done so. The transaction data suggest few have, but the lag between opening and first use is a hypothesis, not a measured fact.

Why registration can jump

Simpler enrolment and interoperability have driven account growth before.

When the Banco de Moçambique published its third-quarter 2025 inclusion indicators on 23 December 2025, it credited a 4.3% rise in e-money accounts per 100 adults to simplified enrolment and improved interoperability between institutions. The same document recorded e-money agents growing 8.6% in the quarter.

Agents reached 486,445 in May, up 9,730 in the month. An agent has every reason to sign up passers-by: enrolment is the first step towards commission-earning deposits. That incentive can inflate registrations faster than genuine users, which is one plausible reading of the May jump. Individual bank accounts rose too, to 6,507,390, up 31,178, so the bank series moved at about a fifth of the wallet pace. The wallet count now stands at four subscriptions for every individual bank account; Jornal Económico put the same comparison at 24.6 million against 6.6 million in November 2025, which shows how quickly the wallet side compounds.

What a marketer measures instead

Track transactions per account, not accounts.

A brand paying per wallet sign-up, or a lender pre-approving wallet holders, should insist on activity thresholds: at least one transaction in the last thirty days and a minimum of three in the last ninety. That converts a registration count into a customer count.

Use the ratio the bank’s tables allow: transactions per subscription. It stood at 12.8 in January and about 14.9 in May. If June’s release shows it falling below 14 while accounts keep climbing, new sign-ups are outpacing use, and campaign spend should follow the transactions.

For an agent-facing business, such as a distributor of float or point-of-sale kits, the same logic applies: sell into agents whose transaction counts are rising, not to those who only enrol customers. Ask each agent for a monthly count of cash-in and cash-out tickets before granting float credit.