MTN Nigeria have decided to move MoMo Payment Service Bank (MoMo PSB) to a platform powered by Ant International’s Alipay+ during a fintech recovery. The figures show that MoMo is growing while wider fintech revenue contracts.
In the August 2026 migration report, its nine-month results show core mobile money revenue rising by 102.2%, while total fintech revenue fell by 25.9% to ₦97.5 billion from ₦131.6 billion a year earlier. The platform change is part of a longer growth strategy, not evidence that the revenue decline has already been reversed.
The revenue gap
The decline is linked to Xtratime, MTN’s airtime and data credit service, suspended from April to June as the company addressed new consumer-lending compliance requirements. MTN later resumed the service under a multi-partner arrangement. Revenue from the service rose 78.5% in Q3 compared with Q2, but that recovery did not erase the nine-month decline.
The 2026 Quarterly figures report shows that fintech revenue was ₦20.3 billion in Q3, down 58.1% from ₦48.4 billion in Q3 2025. MTN management’s target is for the airtime and data credit service to return to expected levels by the end of November.
What Alipay+ changes, and what remains unproven
MTN Group announced its partnership with Ant International in June, outlining plans for a super-app platform with mini-app integration, stronger fraud prevention and more services for consumers and merchants. The August migration puts the technology foundation in place, but does not prove every proposed feature is already available to MoMo customers.
Operating indicators are encouraging. MTN reported ₦43.8 billion in customer wallet balances, four times what it was in December 2025. It attributed the increase in core mobile money revenue largely to higher float income, earnings associated with funds held in wallets. Transaction volumes rose 69.1% between Q2 and Q3.
MTN reported 3.2 million monthly active users on the new platform at September’s end. It cautioned that this measure counts users on the new platform only, while legacy wallets are still being migrated and new customers added. It is not a complete count of everyone still using older MoMo wallets.
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Back Story: From payment bank to broader digital services
MoMo PSB received final approval from the Central Bank of Nigeria in April 2022 and launched the following month. Its role was to expand access to payments and basic financial services; the Ant partnership reflects MTN’s ambition to move towards a broader digital ecosystem.
In terms of regulation, the FCCPC’s 2025 consumer-lending regulations expressly cover digital credit provided as airtime or data and set approval requirements for lending providers and partnerships. MTN linked Xtratime’s suspension to the processes required under that framework.
For customers, the test is whether the new platform makes transfers and other services more dependable, useful and secure in Nigeria’s increasingly competitive payments market. For MTN, the test is financial: higher wallet balances and transaction activity must become durable earnings while Xtratime recovers. Until then, MoMo’s growth and the fintech division’s revenue decline remain two sides of the same story.
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