PawaPay wins Mozambique PSP licence through Quidexplus
PawaPay says Quidexplus Mozambique holds a Bank of Mozambique PSP licence, opening direct merchant onboarding across more than 12 million mobile-money accounts.
PawaPay has a payment service provider (PSP) licence in Mozambique, and the fact that matters is a change of legal model, not a new country. Having followed the firm's trail from a Central Bank of Kenya authorisation on September 16, 2026, the October 8 step reads as permission to acquire merchants in a market PawaPay already lists. PawaPay said the Bank of Mozambique granted the licence to Quidexplus Mozambique, while its markets page still claims 23 countries, Mozambique included. Shore.africa called the same approval a 24th market, which the company has not said.
The licence, on the company's account, lets PawaPay onboard merchants directly and connect them to the mobile money wallets customers already use. The October 8 post publishes no licence number, and no Bank of Mozambique notice carrying one surfaced in the reporting around the award.
What direct licensing changes
"Before we received this licence, we were able to offer a limited service which relied partly on third parties. However, that reliance on third parties is now gone," Ilídio Matchebe, Mozambique country director at PawaPay, told ITWeb Africa. He confirmed to ITWeb that collections and payouts are already fully integrated with Vodacom's M-Pesa and Movitel's E-Mola, while advanced talks continue on inbound remittance.
That account matches the markets page, which splits the business into an aggregator model, where PawaPay holds the permissions and settles to the merchant, and an orchestration model, where the merchant holds the local accounts and PawaPay runs processing through one application programming interface (API). Orchestration is the stated setup in Lesotho, Liberia, Mali, Nigeria and South Sudan, and Mozambique is not among them. A PSP held by Quidexplus Mozambique is what the aggregator model requires, which a coverage logo does not confer.
PawaPay says Mozambique has more than 12 million active mobile money accounts across three operators: M-Pesa (Vodacom), E-Mola (Movitel) and mKesh (Tmcel). The markets page shows M-Pesa and Movitel only. The 12 million figure is given without a link to a central-bank table, so it describes wallets in the country rather than operators that clear on the PawaPay API today.
Across the group, PawaPay says it operates across 23 African markets, processing around 7 million transactions a day for ride-hailing, remittance, retail and non-governmental organisations. Founded in 2020, it says it has processed more than 3.5 billion transactions. The markets page puts that reach at 85% of Africa's mobile money wallets across 42 operators, which is a company claim, not audited volume.
"Mozambique has been one of the most active mobile money markets on the continent for years, but merchants have had no reliable way to operate here at scale," Matchebe said in the company post. "Becoming one of the first PSPs licensed by the Bank of Mozambique changes that. We can now onboard merchants directly and connect them to the operators their customers already use day to day."
PawaPay's "one of the first" line is its own wording, not a register ranking. Coverage through October 14 did not surface a comment from Flutterwave, Onafriq or Cellulant, nor a Bank of Mozambique statement separate from PawaPay's account. Moment, a MultiChoice spin-out, raised $22 million for Africa payments, and Flutterwave took Ripple's backing at $3.2 billion to embed RLUSD in African flows.
On September 16, 2026, PawaPay said Quidexplus Kenya Limited had been authorised by the Central Bank of Kenya as a PSP, limited to payment gateway services that receive, process and settle for merchants. Mozambique came 22 days later, through another Quidexplus company and another supervisor. bunq has opened one banking licence as a platform across the European Union. PawaPay has no equivalent passport: each move from partner access to the aggregator model needs its own subsidiary and its own central bank.
360 Mozambique, citing the company release, said merchant registration should start within days, and that talks continue with wallet operators and remittance firms on inbound flows. That sits next to Matchebe's remark to ITWeb that M-Pesa and E-Mola are already live for collections and payouts. Domestic acquiring on those two wallets is the use the licence was described as unlocking. Inbound remittance, on both accounts, is a further conversation, not a corridor the notice was shown to open by itself.
Merchant contracts with Quidexplus Mozambique would turn the third-party exit Matchebe described into a change in who carries the payment, not only who holds the paper. If mKesh stays off the grid, the 12 million accounts remain a market-size line rather than reachable volume, and another Quidexplus name on a register would matter more than a revised country count. This site reported in 2021 that M-Pesa had climbed past 50 million monthly active users. The onboarding log is the test of whether PawaPay has put a licensed acquiring layer on top of that base.
Reporting by Rick Steves. Filed 14 October 2026, 19:16 GMT.
Senior Reporter, Regulation and Fintech
Rick Steves has seen business and economics through many lenses. He joined the financial services industry in 2009, and has been a financial journalist since 2011.
