PawaPay crosses 3 billion transactions on Africa’s mobile money rails

PawaPay, a UK-based fintech that provides mobile payments solutions to African businesses, has said it processed three billion mobile money transactions, reaching its latest billion in less than nine months and doubling its daily transaction volume to five million payments.

Africa’s mobile money economy was worth $1.4 trillion in 2025 and has long been associated with financial inclusion and cash exchange. Increasingly, however, businesses are using mobile money to collect payments, pay customers, and operate across multiple markets.

PawaPay’s latest milestone offers a glimpse into this growing trend. The company, founded in 2020, says it connects large and small businesses to nearly 50 mobile operators across 20 African countries through a single API, allowing merchants to accept and disburse payments without building separate integrations for each market. Since launch, PawaPay said it has processed more than €10 billion ($11.63 billion) in payments.

“Mobile money, as the principal means of digital payments on the continent, is growing year on year,” Jamie Steell, the company’s chief operating officer, told TechCabal in an interview. “It’s like 20% up year on year consistently.”

Steell attributed the growth to a combination of demographic and technological factors, including a young population, falling smartphone costs, cheaper internet access, and the rapid digitisation of commerce.

“There is a digital environment growth that is happening, and that is driving growth of all our merchants that we see come onto our pipes,” he said.

For much of the last two decades, mobile money’s growth was powered by person-to-person transfers and remittances. Today, a growing share of activity is coming from businesses using mobile money to collect and send payments across multiple African markets.

More than $2.1 trillion flowed through mobile money globally in 2025, with merchant payments the fastest-growing use case, rising by 42% year-on-year to $155 billion, according to GSMA, the global industry body for telecom operators.

“More merchants now offer mobile money as a payment channel,” GSMA said in its latest State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money. Monthly active merchants rose by 59% in 2025. 

Yet while transaction volumes continue to rise, mobile money remains largely a payments tool rather than a store of value. Most users still cash out funds instead of keeping money within mobile money ecosystems.

According to GSMA, cash was the dominant way funds entered and left mobile money networks in 2025, although transfers between banks and mobile wallets were becoming increasingly common.

Steell believes the next phase of growth will come when users begin treating mobile money wallets as primary financial accounts.

“In five years, mobile money wallets have to become where the money goes into and stays there because of the use cases for that, from merchant payments to savings to investments,” he said. “The money will stay in that ecosystem, and the ecosystem will exponentially grow.”

The strongest growth on PawaPay’s network is coming from Ghana, Tanzania, Cameroon and Uganda, according to Steell. That aligns with GSMA’s data, which showed that East Africa accounted for roughly three-quarters of global merchant payment growth in 2025.

“We are really interested in growing the kind of volume right the way across Africa in all the markets that we are servicing,” he said. “Thankfully, all of them are on the up.”

The company currently processes payments on behalf of a limited number of merchants in Nigeria and is not yet operating as a full aggregator in the market. Still, Steell said the company is considering expanding its presence.

“Nigeria is a huge market. We are not ignorant to the opportunity that exists in Nigeria,” he said. “Expanding our operation there is definitely something that we are interested in doing.”

While mobile money transaction volumes reached ₦20.71 trillion ($13.49 billion) in the first quarter of 2025, according to  Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS), the market is dominated by fintech-led wallets such as OPay and PalmPay rather than telecom operator-led services that dominate countries like Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.

“Nigeria is different to the rest of sub-Saharan Africa as it pertains to local payment methods,” Steell said. “Mobile money in Nigeria is not the same as it is in Kenya.”