MTN and Airtel have harmonised the charges for sending mobile money across the two networks, leading to the growth of the platform, a report shows.
According to the Uganda Communications Commission (UCC) report for April to June 2022, the harmonisation of the charges have promoted the growth of the mobile money network.
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“The quarter saw the harmonisation of Airtel and MTN mobile money cross network remittance charges. Consequently, MTN and Airtel [now] have uniform cross network transfer rates,” the report reads in part.
According to the report, Mobile Money wallets linked to mobile network operators had grown to 36.9 million, as of June, while 3.8 million were administered by licensed non-mobile network operator payment service providers.
Mr Richard Yego, the MTN Mobile Money managing director, said the harmonisation has led to the reduction of tariffs.
For instance, he said, under the harmonisation, customers, who send Shs60,000 – the largest percentage of MTN’s customers threshold – are now charged Shs1,500 to send money to Airtel compared to Shs3,000 previously.
“Before very few customers used to send money across networks because it was too expensive. This is why some customers kept on saying do you have an MTN line or an Airtel line before making a decision to send money,” he said.
He noted that the uniform charges had impacted MTN’s number of unique users, growing from just 40,000 in April to more than 100,000 while transactional values have since more than tripled
