pawaPay has secured a Payment Service Provider licence from the Bank of Mozambique through its local subsidiary, Quidexplus Mozambique.
pawaPay has obtained a Payment Service Provider (PSP) licence from the Bank of Mozambique through its local subsidiary, Quidexplus Mozambique. The licence allows pawaPay to onboard merchants directly and provide regulated payment services, connecting businesses to the mobile money services their customers use every day.
Mobile money market in Mozambique
Mozambique has more than 12 million active mobile money accounts, spread across three operators: M-Pesa (Vodacom), e-Mola (Movitel), and mKesh (Tmcel). With mobile money usage divided among these providers, merchants seeking to accept payments from a broad customer base need access to all three. As a licensed PSP, pawaPay can provide this connectivity to merchants under local regulatory oversight.
Ilídio Matchebe, Mozambique Country Director at pawaPay, stated that Mozambique has been one of the most active mobile money markets in Africa for years, but that merchants have lacked a reliable way to operate there at scale. According to Matchebe, the licence changes this by allowing pawaPay to onboard merchants directly and connect them to the operators their customers already use daily. The move shifts merchant access from informal or indirect arrangements to a regulated, locally licensed route.
Expanding PawaPay’s African operations
pawaPay operates across 23 African markets and processes around 7 million transactions a day for customers in sectors including ride-hailing, remittances, retail, and non-governmental organisations. Founded in 2020, the company has processed more than 3.5 billion transactions to date.
The Mozambique licence adds a regulated local entity to this regional network. For businesses already using pawaPay in other African markets, such as ride-hailing platforms and remittance providers, the licence creates a route to reach Mozambican mobile money users through the same provider. It also positions the company to onboard local merchants seeking access to the country’s three mobile money operators through a single connection.
