Mozambique’s wallet agents pass 400,000 as August 2025 transactions reach 332.7m

August 31, 2025

The agent network grew by 20,079 outlets in one month, twice its usual pace, and service payments jumped with it.

Mozambique’s electronic money agent network passed 400,000 in August 2025, closing the month at 404,957 outlets after adding 20,079 in thirty-one days. From the end of 2024 to July the network had grown by roughly 10,000 a month, so August ran at twice that pace, according to Banco de Moçambique’s monthly statistical summaries.

The wallets those agents serve processed 332.7 million operations worth MT215.8bn in the month, the highest count of 2025 so far. Payments for services rose 15% on July to 29.6 million, the fastest-moving line in the table. The agent is the physical layer of Mozambican payments, and August shows it thickening where the money already flows.

Where the 20,079 went

The south and centre each added about 8,000 agents, and Maputo Cidade alone took 5,398.

The regional table in the September summary sets end-August against end-July. The southern zone rose from 157,822 to 165,907 agents, the central zone from 131,877 to 139,926 and the northern zone from 95,179 to 99,124. Maputo Cidade grew from 55,739 to 61,137, Sofala from 41,877 to 45,186 and Nampula from 59,509 to 61,675. Cabo Delgado added 1,147 to reach 22,389.

One line moved the other way. Maputo Província slipped from 57,344 to 57,129, a fall of 215 agents in the province that surrounds the capital. Registrations can lapse as well as grow, and the count is a register of agents rather than a measure of how many trade on a given day, a gap the published tables do not close.

What an agent actually does all day

About 350 cash operations per agent in August, or roughly eleven a day.

An agent is a small retailer or kiosk that holds two stocks, physical cash and electronic float, and earns a commission when it converts one into the other. A customer who wants to load a wallet hands over cash, and the agent sends float to the customer. A customer who wants cash sends float back and receives notes. Every conversion drains one stock and fills the other, so an agent who sells more of one than the other must rebalance at a bank or with the operator.

August’s deposits reached 89.8 million operations and withdrawals 51.3 million, per the summary’s month-on-month difference. Spread across the end-month network, that is about 141 million cash operations, or roughly 350 per agent and eleven a day on a simple average. Deposits outnumbered withdrawals by 1.75 to one, so the typical agent took in more cash than it paid out and carried a cash surplus to manage.

Service payments finally move

29.6 million bill payments worth MT3.5bn, still under a tenth of the count but growing fastest.

Transfers remain the bulk of the traffic at 162.0 million operations and MT108.3bn, up 2.7% in count on July. Service payments grew far faster, from 25.6 million to 29.6 million operations and from MT3.0bn to MT3.5bn, an average of about MT118 per payment. They still make up under 9% of operations, but a channel that grows 15% in a month while its neighbours grow 3% is worth watching. Remittances lean the same way: the national financial inclusion strategy, as reported by Club of Mozambique on 18 August, puts electronic money at about 80% of remittance transfers and banks at 7%.

Card infrastructure told the opposite story. The same summary shows point-of-sale terminals at 32,748 and ATMs at 1,360 at end-August, against 33,357 and 1,364 a month earlier, while wallet subscribers reached 23.58 million, up 527,067 on July. The table’s 2024 column puts the year-end stock at 315,005 agents, so the network has grown 29% in eight months.

Where to place the next bet

Use agents as a distribution channel, and start where payments are already growing.

A consumer-goods distributor, an insurer or a microlender that needs cash collected in towns without bank branches can now treat agents as its default collection point. The August map says which towns to test first: Maputo Cidade, Sofala and Nampula added the most outlets, so agent competition there should be sharpest and commission terms most negotiable. The central bank’s second-quarter inclusion indicators, published on 27 August, put electronic money agent growth at 8.8% for the quarter, so the August surge fits a run rather than a spike.

Agent economics are about to change. On 25 August the government said it was preparing an amendment to the personal income tax code to tax the commissions of agents and of the three operators, according to a Club of Mozambique report that also cites 787 agents newly registered with tax numbers in the first half. A distributor that signs agent partners should model net commission after tax, then ask each operator for merchant terms on service payments this quarter, opening the biggest cities first.