Airtel Money Africa, the mobile money arm of pan-African operator Airtel Africa, has announced an extended partnership with Africa’s largest mobile money payment service provider (PSP), pawaPay, to enable seamless cross-border payments for licensed international money transfer operators (IMTOs) across seven key Airtel Africa markets.
The partners say that this collaboration officially launches pawaPay’s service for inbound remittances into Uganda, Rwanda, Zambia, Malawi, Gabon, Congo Brazzaville and Tanzania.
The partners add that the agreement allows IMTOs to efficiently deliver funds globally directly to recipients’ more than 161 million Airtel Money customers’ wallets, leveraging pawaPay’s reliability, scalability, and 99.9% platform uptime.
Of course, this isn’t an entirely new development. It is building on what the two companies call five years of trusted collaboration in domestic mobile money, strengthening and simplifying Airtel Money Africa’s backend processes, using pawaPay’s robust payment service provider infrastructure, which processes over four million transactions daily.
There have been a number of digital payment deals involving the sub-Saharan African remittance and money transfer market in recent months. In July we reported that Western Union, Zoona Transactions Zambia Limited and Chipper Cash had announced the launch of international money transfer services in the Chipper Cash app.
In May it was announced that TerraPay, a global money movement company, had partnered with Wave Mobile Money, a mobile money provider, in what was described as a strategic move to enhance cross-border remittance services in West Africa – and specifically Mali.
In February M-Pesa Safaricom announced plans to partner with Dashen Bank and CashGo to launch a new international remittance service in Ethiopia that enables users to receive money from abroad directly into their M-Pesa mobile wallets.
