$500bn mobile money puts
Africa fintech in AI league

Artificial intelligence has become the shorthand for a boom that grows faster than regulators and consumers can digest. Mobile money in Africa belongs in the same conversation, for the same reasons: scale and impact.

Vodacom Group’s latest trading update includes a single figure that leaps out: its mobile money platforms processed $500.7-billion in transaction value over the past 12 months.

That is not revenue, of course. It speaks to how often people choose a phone over a queue or a PIN over cash. It also tells us that mobile money has moved past the “financial inclusion” label and into the realm of core economic plumbing.

To get a grip on the size, it helps to compare it with entire economies. The World Bank lists Sweden’s 2024 GDP at about $603.7-billion and Belgium’s at about $671.4-billion. (World Bank Open Data) Vodacom’s $500.7-billion annualised mobile money throughput comes close, except that it is generated through millions of routine transactions spread across multiple markets.

The global context underlines just how dramatically this segment has transformed financial services. The GSMA’s State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money 2025 puts global mobile money transaction value in 2024 at over $1.68-trillion, from around 108-billion transactions. Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for $1.1-trillion of that value, alongside around 80-billion transactions. (gsma.com).

Vodacom’s $500.7-billion therefore represents a meaningful share of the continent’s total activity, within a global system that already processes sums measured in trillions. That is the part that often gets lost amid the global frenzy around AI investment. 

Indeed, mobile money is generating the kinds of numbers we tend only to hear in the context of investment in AI.

The GSMA reports 2.1-billion registered mobile money accounts worldwide in 2024, with 514-million monthly active accounts. The industry took around 18 years to reach 1-billion accounts and 250-million active users, then doubled those levels in five years. That acceleration mirrors the AI curve in a way that goes beyond a neat analogy. It is the same adoption pattern: once the utility becomes obvious, growth becomes self-propelling.

There is even a human equivalent of AI agents in this mix: in effect sales reps taking mobilwe money into the furthest corners of rural Africa.

The GSMA counts 28-million registered mobile money agents in 2024, with 10-million active monthly, and an average of 755 registered agents per 100,000 adults in mobile money countries. Agents “cashed in” $356-billion in 2024, which the GSMA says accounted for over half the funds entering the ecosystem. That single detail explains why mobile money thrives in cash-heavy economies: the system accommodates cash instead of pretending it will vanish next quarter.

It also helps to set mobile money alongside another set of flows that shape household economies: remittances.

The World Bank estimated remittance flows to low- and middle-income countries at $669-billion in 2023. The Migration Data Portal, drawing on World Bank figures, puts global remittances at $865-billion in 2023, rising to an estimated $905-billion in 2024. (Migration Data Portal).

These are different categories, and they should not be forced into a like-for-like comparison. Remittances are cross-border transfers, driven by migration and exchange rates. Mobile money transaction value includes domestic circulation, often with the same funds moving multiple times as they change hands. Even so, the juxtaposition is useful: remittances dominate many development debates, while mobile money circulates amounts in the same magnitude range, inside national and regional economies, day after day.

Economic impact has also become measurable.

The GSMA’s 2025 report estimates that, by the end of 2023, the total GDP of countries with a mobile money service was more than $720-billion higher than it would have been otherwise, equivalent to a 1.7% increase by 2023. For Sub-Saharan Africa, the report puts mobile money’s GDP contribution at about $190-billion in 2023, up from about $150-billion in 2022.

Those are modelling estimates, but they still provide a credible indicator of how mobile money has shifted from a substitute for banking to a platform that supports saving, borrowing, paying, receiving, and trading in ways that were previously slow, costly, or simply unavailable.

Vodacom’s update provides some clues on how that platform evolves once basic transfers become routine. In its international operations, it points to products such as communal savings and fuel loans, along with double-digit growth in M-Pesa revenue across markets. Egypt, highlighted as a standout performer, delivered 39% service revenue growth, with Egypt financial services revenue up 59.4% and active customers rising to 13.5-million. Those numbers are corporate performance indicators, yet they also serve as a proxy for consumer behaviour: more people keeping money in a wallet, moving it through the system, and using it for more than airtime and cash-out.

The temptation in writing about a figure like $500.7-billion is to treat it as proof of modernity. That does a disservice to the real significance.

A half-trillion dollars in transaction value points to a system that has normalised digital trust at scale: trust in the handset, in the agent, in the network, in the interface, and in the idea that value can be stored and moved without physical exchange.

As Shameel Joosub, Vodacom Group CEO, says in Vodacom’s results statement, “Financial services remains a key growth engine.”