Tech in Africa
MFS Africa is a Pan-African fintech platform facilitating low-cost digital payments across different countries and networks. The company just announced a partnership with Xoom – a PayPal remittance service, so as to facilitate secure mobile money transfer across Africa. MFS Africa will connect Xoom to its digital payment hub which is the largest across Europe. This allows the company’s customers across Europe, North America, and the UK to send money to their counterparts in Ghana, Cameroon, Zambia, Uganda, Rwanda, and Zimbabwe. There are plans of expanding the service to other countries by 2023.
Xoom currently provides money transfers to bank accounts and cash pick up locations stretching across 160 markets. The partnership will see Xoom expand its presence across the continent by allowing transfers to money wallets through MFS Africa mobile money wallets. This MFS Africa hub wallet connects over 200 million mobile wallets across Africa through one application programming interface (API).
The Vice President and General Manager for Xoom, Julian King termed Africa as a “very important market for Xoom.” He pointed to the fact that nowhere else moves more money through mobile phones than Subsaharan Africa. There might be 5 bank branches spread out per 100,000 people in Subsaharan Africa in 2019 alone. The number of active mobile phones are a hundred times more than that.
Founder and CEO of MFS Africa Dare Okoudjou expressed excitement in working with Xoom and its parent company PayPal as they connect their network to the wider world.
