The March 2025 Summary of Financial and Economic Data from the Bank of Ghana indicates that over 50 million registered mobile money wallets and 485,000 agents wallets in Ghana are inactive.
Per the report, as of the close of February 2025, there were 74.1 million registered wallets, out of which only 26.3 million were active, leaving a significant 50.5 million wallets completely dormant.
This means over the last 16 years mobile money has been here, the number of wallets gone dormant are more than twice the number of active wallets.
The reasons for wallets going dormant are varied. Some may have churned due to SIM re-registration, death, travel, or simply because the customer lost interest due to reasons such as fraud or even one’s strategy to avoid repeated financial requests from family and friends.
Some customers also have multiple SIMs with registered mobile money wallets, but they stick to using just one so the others remain dormant. Again, some corporate bodies usually register bulk SIMs for their staff, so once an employee leaves their current job they abandon the SIM and the wallet and both go dormant over time.
Another reason for this phenomenon is fraudsters who abandon wallets they use to commit fraud, once the wallet is discovered as a fraudulent one.
It is importance to note that in the early days of mobile money, churn rate was close to 100% because customers were more used to over the counter services, where people depended on agents for all transactions included cashout and transfers. So the secret PINs of customers was open to agents and some agents took advantage of that and stole from customers’ wallets.
As a result of those challenges, almost everyone kept throwing away their mobile money wallets after a few uses. Those were the days when MTN kept investing in mobile money for market penetration while making no profit; and the other operators just watched as MTN kept losing money.
But the high churn levels of MoMo wallets is quite a normal pattern compared to the churn of SIM cards themselves. In fact, some telco executives have been telling Techfocus24 that per the 90 reports they file with the National Communications Authority (NCA), the churn levels for SIM cards is even worse due to the same factors causing high wallet churn rates.
It is however important to note that whereas under the NCA regulations, it takes a maximum of 180 days of inactivity for a SIM card to be churned, under the BoG regulations, it takes up to two years of inactivity for a mobile money wallet to be churned.
485k registered MoMo agent inactive
Again, per the BoG report, the number of registered MoMo agents over the 16-year period stood at 896,000, but less than half of them – 411,000 are active as of the end of February 2025. This means a significant 485,000 wallets are inactive.
Again, Techfocus24 gathered that some of reasons responsible for the churn in regular mobile money wallets also cause the high churn rate in agent wallets. But one significant reason for agent wallet churn is the viability of the mobile money agency business.
Years ago, executives of the various mobile money agency groups noted that when the business first started it was very profitable because there were very few agents serving many customers within particular communities. But now a single community has several agents, and that has depleted value in that business.
That observation was one of the reasons agents asked particularly MobileMoney Limited (MTN MoMo) to increase their commissions in the face of the steep competition created by MTN MoMo, which registered several agents within same communities.
While MTN is yet to increase the commissions of the agents, there are widespread complaints across the country that MTN is now refusing to register new agents. Several people have complained that when they try to register as MTN MoMo agents the feedback they often get from the MTN customer service centres across the country is that MTN has stopped registering mobile money agents because that space is saturated.
But at MTN’s 2025 Annual General Meeting this month, when the question was posed by a shareholder, the company swiftly debunked the claim and assured the public that, contrary to the feedback people claim they get from the customer service centres, there is no moratorium on the registration of mobile money agents.
“We have not stopped registering new agents. What we are doing is selective distribution of agents. The objective is to ensure good spread of our agent network rather than over concentration of agents at the same location, which destroy the viability of the agent business and deprive ease of access,” MML CEO, Shaibu Haruna stated.
He said the process involves physical verification of the proposed location by the company’s field sales staff before it is vetted for approval.
The MML Boss said even last year they registered thousands of new agents across the country, growing their active agents base by at least 13 per cent.
MTN MoMo
Speaking of MTN, MobileMoney Limited (MTN MoMo) finished 2024 with 17.2 million active mobile money wallets, which means compared to the 23.6 million active wallets Bank of Ghana reported, MTN controls about 73% of active mobile money wallets in the country.
This also means the four other wallets – Telecel Cash, AT Money, Zeepay and G-Money are sharing the remaining 6.4 million (27%) or less among themselves.
It may as well be the case that most of the 50.5 million inactive wallets are also on MTN, which is by far the biggest mobile money wallet in the country – indeed a de facto mobile money significant market power (SMP).
Health of MoMo Ecosystem
Meanwhile, between January and February 2025, the 23.6 million active wallets recorded a total of GHS649.2 billion from 1.415 billion transactions. But the actual cash float on the mobile money platforms over the two-month period was GHS54.2 billion.
Same period (January and February) in 2024, the value of transactions stood at GHS394.2 billion value, volume of transaction was 1.227 billion and the actual cash float balance on the platform then was GHS34.2 billion.
From figures above, cash float balance in the first two months of grew by 58.5% year-on-year, while value of transaction for first two months of 2025 grew 64.7% year-on-year.
But the health of the mobile money ecosystem, being the number of times each cedi circulated within the mobile money space, determined by dividing the value of transaction by the actual cash float, indicates that for both periods, each cedis moved around about 12 times – 11.5 in 2024 and 11.9 in 2025.
On the mobile money interoperability front, the first two months of the year saw some GHS5.8 billion value of transactions from 39.1 million transactions.
