Mozambique’s Q1 2026: 1.02 billion wallet transactions and a rebound in March

March 31, 2026

Wordless fine-line illustration: A single bridge of light thrown across a wide river at dawn, joining a stone bank building on one shore to a cluster of small phone-lit market stalls on the other, with figures crossing in both directions

The quarter closed with MT669bn moved through e-money institutions, and the March instant-payment launch coincided with the first month of account growth.

Mozambique’s e-money institutions closed the first quarter of 2026 with 1,024.1 million transactions worth MT669.4bn, according to the Banco de Moçambique’s April summary. March supplied 364.8 million of them, worth MT245.6bn, and the wallet account count climbed by 502,128 to 25,298,679.

The month also brought SPIM, the instant-payment system that went live on 2 March. After two months of falling wallet subscriptions the count turned upward just as banks and wallets were joined on one switch. Until the bank publishes usage data for the switch itself, the timing is a coincidence of the calendar, and anyone building a strategy on it should say so.

The quarter in four lines

Transfers carried 52% of the count and 52% of the value.

The 2026 column of the April summary shows deposits of 261.4 million worth MT190.6bn, withdrawals of 143.5 million worth MT118.3bn, transfers of 537.1 million worth MT349.8bn and service payments of 82.1 million worth MT10.7bn. The average transaction across the quarter was MT654.

Subtracting February’s cumulative figures gives March by itself: 92.1 million deposits, 51.9 million withdrawals, 191.8 million transfers and 29.1 million payments, an average of MT673. Each month of the quarter has been larger than the last: 321.3 million in January, 338.0 million in February, 364.8 million in March.

The value line moved faster than the count. March’s MT245.6bn was 23% above January’s MT199.4bn on a volume gain of 14%, which is the average ticket climbing from MT620 to MT673 in two months.

What SPIM changed at the counter

Individuals pay nothing on transfers between banks and wallets, up to MT200,000 a day.

Under Aviso n.º 1/GBM/2026 every interbank transaction ordered by an individual through the new system is free, and daily limits are MT200,000 for individuals and MT500,000 for companies, as MZNews reported. Wallet accounts have their own tiers of up to MT200,000, MT500,000 and MT3 million. The system runs 24 hours, including weekends and holidays.

AIM’s account of the launch names 15 commercial banks, 12 microbanks and the three wallets as participants. The mechanism is settlement in seconds: the beneficiary’s funds are available at once, and the person sending pays nothing. A customer who kept a small balance in a bank and another in a wallet, and hesitated to move money between them, now has less reason to hold two dormant accounts and more reason to hold one active one.

Reading the account rebound

The first-quarter net is still a 0.7% fall from December.

Diário Económico, reporting the quarter’s data, described the fall from 25,473,998 accounts in December to 25,298,679 as the first reduction since the wave of expansion began, and put the agent network at 467,622, up 21,018 in the quarter. In March itself agents rose by 9,809 and individual bank accounts by 41,777, to 6,448,249.

Read together, the three series say that the wallet base shed subscriptions in January and February, regained about 502,000 in March, and still ended the quarter with 175,319 fewer than it started. The bank’s tables give no cause for any of the three movements, so treat explanations, including SPIM, as hypotheses to test against April’s data in the Diário Económico report and the next summary.

The decision for a payments team

Connect to SPIM, then re-price around free transfers.

A business that collects by bank transfer can now ask individual customers to pay from a wallet at no charge to them. Because the transfer is instant, reconciliation moves from next-day to real time, and a cashier can release goods on confirmation instead of waiting for a statement.

Finance directors should ask their bank for the SPIM participation date and the corporate limit of MT500,000 a day, then split larger collections across days or route them through the real-time gross settlement system. April’s release will show whether March’s rebound was the start of a trend.