PawaPay has secured a Payment Service Provider (PSP) license from the Bank of Mozambique through its local subsidiary, Quidexplus Mozambique, giving the payments company permission to onboard merchants directly in the country.
The license is expected to make it easier for businesses to collect and disburse money through Mozambique’s mobile-money networks, with merchant onboarding expected to begin in the coming days.
PawaPay says it is already in advanced discussions with M-Pesa, e-Mola, and international remittance providers about expanding payment and inbound remittance services.And there is a pretty good reason why PawaPay wants a bigger foothold in Mozambique: mobile money is massive there.
At the end of November 2025, Mozambique had about 24.6 million mobile-money accounts compared with roughly 6.7 million bank accounts, almost four times as many. The country’s three main mobile-money services are Vodacom’s M-Pesa, Movitel’s e-Mola and Tmcel’s mKesh.
The number of mobile-money accounts has continued to grow in 2026, reaching about 25.4 million by the end of 2025, according to the central bank’s Q4 indicators, while mobile-money agents also expanded.
Why should we care?
Millions of wallets is one thing; giving businesses a reliable way to actually accept payments from those wallets at scale is another.
PawaPay’s model gives businesses one API instead of forcing them to build separate integrations with every mobile-money operator. The company says it now connects businesses to almost 50 mobile-money operators across 20 African markets and has processed more than 3 billion transactions by June 2026. By October, it says it was processing around 7 million transactions daily across 23 African markets.
In Mozambique, its current setup supports M-Pesa collections and e-Mola payouts, although e-Mola collections and Tmcel’s mKesh are not yet available through the platform.The timing is also interesting because Mozambique has been tightening and modernising its payments infrastructure.
In February 2026, the Bank of Mozambique established the country’s instant-payment system, designed to allow electronic retail payments to move continuously and immediately. Then, in July, it passed Law No. 15/2026, replacing the country’s 2008 National Payment System law and strengthening the central bank’s powers over payment systems and operators.
The new framework is intended to improve regulatory certainty, encourage innovation and bring Mozambique’s payment system closer to international standards.PawaPay’s licence therefore arrives at a useful moment: Mozambique already has a huge mobile-money user base, but the country is still building the infrastructure and regulatory framework needed to turn those wallets into a more useful payment rail for businesses.
And this is part of a wider expansion for PawaPay. In September 2026, its Kenyan subsidiary, Quidexplus Kenya, also received authorisation from the Central Bank of Kenya to provide payment-gateway services to merchants.
Globally, mobile money is moving in the same direction, with the GSMA reporting that more than $2 trillion passed through mobile-money services in 2025 and merchant payments alone reached $155 billion.
So PawaPay is not simply chasing more wallets; it is betting that African mobile money will increasingly become the payment infrastructure businesses build around.
