Africa teams up with XOOM, a PAYPAL service

MFS Africa Partners with Xoom to Enable Secure Mobile Money Transfers Across Africa

Port-Louis and London, December 9, 2020 – Leading pan-African fintech platform MFS Africa partners with Xoom, a PayPal service, to offer secure and convenient mobile money transfers to seven countries across Africa. MFS Africa will connect Xoom to its digital payments hub – the largest in Africa – allowing the company’s customers in the UK, Europe, and North America to send money to people in Cameroon, Ghana, Rwanda, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe – with plans to include more countries on the continent in 2021.

Expanding Mobile Money Services in Africa

Xoom already provides money transfers to bank accounts and cash pick-up locations in 160 markets around the world. The partnership will allow Xoom to continue to expand its presence in Africa by providing transfers to mobile money wallets through MFS Africa’s digital payments hub. This hub connects more than 200 million mobile wallets in Africa through one application programming interface (API).

The Importance of Africa for Digital Payments

“Africa is a very important market for Xoom and we are delighted to expand our services on the continent,” said Julian King, Vice President and General Manager, Xoom. “There is nowhere else in the world that moves more money on mobile phones than Sub-Saharan Africa. While there are only five bank branches per 100,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa as of 2019, there are over a hundred times that number of mobile money agents. Africa has nearly half of the global total of registered mobile money accounts—almost 400 million in total.”

Tackling High Remittance Costs in Sub-Saharan Africa

By connecting Xoom’s users to mobile money users in Africa, the partnership will create new possibilities for remittances in sub-Saharan Africa, which is estimated to be worth $51 billion in 2020, according to the World Bank. The region is still the most expensive in the world to send money to, with an average cost of 9.3 percent. This partnership will help tackle the issue by giving several African markets access to Xoom’s transparent and competitive pricing.

A Shared Vision for Financial Inclusion

Dare Okoudjou, founder and CEO of MFS Africa, commented on the partnership: “Xoom – and their parent company PayPal – are pioneers in digital-first payments, and we are excited to partner with Xoom to further connect our network to the wider world. Diaspora remittances have always been critical for the livelihood of hundreds of millions of Africans, and leveraging digital channels to deliver those remittances has always been an important part of our mission. But in a time of global crisis, when brick-and-mortar money transfer stores are not open, connecting digital payments players in the diaspora to the largest network of mobile wallets in Africa doesn’t just make good business sense – it’s the right thing to do from a public health and human welfare perspective, too.”