Nomanini integrates with MFS Africa to increase mobile money footprint

South Africa-based enterprise payments platform provider, Nomanini, has announced it is integrating with MFS Africa to enable informal merchants to send and receive international remittances.

Nomanini’s payments platform enables informal retail merchants in emerging markets to distribute digital goods, including airtime and prepaid electricity, as well as facilitate cash transfers, bill payments and other banking transactions for people in informal markets. The integration with MFS Africa allows merchants to facilitate international remittances, increasing their financial service offering in their communities.“This means that merchants in far-flung areas can act more and more like a bank branch, increasing the level of financial inclusion where it’s most needed”, says CEO Vahid Monadjem.

Increasing the availability of mobile money in informal markets 

MFS Africa connects over 120 million mobile money recipients across all major mobile networks in Africa, and Nomanini’s clients will have immediate access to this network, increasing the availability of mobile money in informal and rural areas across Africa.

Mobile money integration has benefits across the board, with service providers such as mobileoperators and financial institutions, merchants and consumers all benefitting from the move. For mobile operators and banks, Nomanini helps to increase merchant acceptance, and in turn increasing consumer usage.

By offering international remittances and other mobile money services, Nomanini merchants increase direct revenue, and also attract footfall to their business. This provides informal retailer merchants the opportunity to cross-sell other goods and services, and become a ‘one stop shop’.

Consumers gain from this greater availability of mobile money services, because informal retail merchants are 10 to 20 times more prevalent than mobile money agents. This in turn creates affordability for consumers, as merchants can transact lower values because they are not entirely dependent on mobile money transactions to earn an income. 

A maturing fintech ecosystem

Says Monadjem, ‘Mobile money’ used to be a catch-all phrase used to describe everything from consumer wallets to building agent networks, to switching to more services, and international remittances. This is now maturing into a fintech industry with more specialist roles.’

This widespread shift towards specialisation undoubtedly makes strong partnerships even more critical for long-term improvement. To this end, Nomanini is convening a peer conference to foster more dialogue and partnerships between fintech innovators in this maturing ecosystem. Nomanini is also in talks with more partners, and by leveraging existing technology it allows them to focus on their niche - merchant services.