The number of Electronic Money Institution (EMI) agents in Mozambique, which work through mobile telecoms operators, increased by 10.5% in three months, to almost 225,000, covering all 154 districts in the country.
According to a statistical report by the Bank of Mozambique (BdM), the total number of EMI agents totalled 203,200 last September, a figure that had risen to 224,700 by the end of December.
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The same report adds that all the country’s districts already have IME agents, with the city of Maputo having the largest number, more than 33,000.
According to the BdM, in 2023, the institutions broke the record for transfers, with more than 400 million transactions.”By 2021, the country had 11.4 million accounts at the EMIs, the following year it rose to 11.9 million and last year the number soared to 16.5 million.”
In the budget proposal for 2024, the Executive plans to continue the fiscal policy reforms to “increase the level of revenue collection”, in particular by “taxing the commissions of electronic money agents and institutions”.
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Mozambique currently has three electronic money institutions belonging to the three mobile telecoms operators. These are the mKesh mobile wallet, owned by the state operator Tmcel, which was the first to be created in 2012, followed by Vodacom’s M-Pesa in 2013 and Movitel’s e-Mola the following year.
