Africa’s exploding population presents huge growth opportunities; A world-class digital payments ecosystem will be fundamental to that, write Moment CEO Joel Yarbrough and MultiChoice Africa Group Executive Head Delivery & Operations Craig Coetzer
Africa is an exciting, vibrant and creative place to do business. But make no mistake, it has its challenges. Currency devaluation, political instability, and service disruptions are endemic. Africa is not for sissies, as the saying goes.
In navigating those challenges, relationships matter. It’s not so much about throwing money at a problem, it’s about investing time, building trust, meeting with partners and regulators, and understanding each other’s needs.
Africa offers an enormous upside for those prepared to make this time investment. The continent’s population is set to reach 2.5 billion by 2050, and Africa’s people are embracing digital technology, as the World Bank confirms. They are leveraging digital connectivity to improve their lives, educate themselves, send remittances, and start small enterprises. There is value in investing in that level of human development.
The payments opportunity
Running through this African growth trajectory is a particular business thread: payments. There are opportunities for anyone who can simplify, rationalise and standardise payments for the continent’s dynamic financial economy.
An organisation in just such a position is MultiChoice, the leading pan-African video entertainment provider for almost 40 years. In building a pay-TV network across the continent, with up to 23.5 million customers across 50+ markets, and 100 million+ monthly viewers, MultiChoice also built relationships across the continent to collect payments, for DStv, GOtv, and Showmax – potentially the only large enterprise to need such enormous breadth.
The Group has converted the opportunity that this represents, partnering with global venture-capital firm General Catalyst and payments company Rapyd to launch Moment, which aims to be the broadest, deepest payment network across Africa.
Launching with Showmax and DStv as initial clients, Moment started processing payments for parts of the group in January 2024. By November 2024 MultiChoice was already collecting around 35% of its revenue through Moment rails, and those numbers are rising quickly. Services to other enterprises were rolled out in August.
Moment already collects and disburses across 44 African countries, accepting 200+ local payment methods – spanning in-person payments at over 1 million store and agent locations, mobile money, credit and debit cards, bank transfers, and digital wallets.
Enabling consumers and businesses to move from cash to digital, Moment and its network offers users access to better financial opportunities, lower prices, higher quality goods and services, and full access to the digitally enabled economy.
Expanding the ecosystem
To access the initial target market of large enterprises that will benefit from the reach, breadth, and high performance needed by MultiChoice, Moment has built out a fully cloud-native infrastructure. The platform can deliver on the high daily and weekly loads needed for one of the largest billing bases on the continent, and also smoothly deal with the potential for network outages, power cuts, and other disruptions.
In order to ensure businesses have access to the daily cash flow they need, Moment has built a robust financial reconciliation and settlement system capable of automating and simplifying the daily reconciliation process for enterprises and enabling them to spend tight staffing budgets efficiently, while getting fast, accurate financial reporting and access to their receivables.
To help these enterprise customers expand their customer bases, Moment opens up the largest mass-market suite of payment channels through its network, enabling businesses to fully tap into the mass market’s buying power for the first time with a single API connection – providing access to more than a million in-person payment locations across spaza shops, modern retail locations, and a host of online payment options tuned to the needs of each local market.
To ensure that Moment’s clients and the market are ready for the future, Moment is building a “coalition” around real-time payments, to educate consumers on the benefits of PayShap and other real-time payment methods that can significantly reduce cost and increase payment speed. DStv and Moment launched PayShap payments in South Africa as the first “consumer to business” real-time payment option built on South Africa’s RPP payments system. Moment has developed partnerships with similar systems in the SADC countries and Nigeria to expand real-time payments as the market evolves.
Simplifying the process
One of the reasons MultiChoice first looked at the payments space was precisely because it is a complex environment, characterised by multiple service agreements, commission rates and exchange rates. It made sense to try to simplify the payments landscape, for everyone’s benefit.
Africa is a challenging territory, but Africans are agile and innovative. Trends and new solutions emerge constantly. Any platform entering this space must recognise that there isn’t one answer; there are many. By partnering with MultiChoice, Moment has built out technology with the flexibility to configure the right solution for each market.
The upsides of building for the challenging scale of MultiChoice as a launch client are significant – other enterprises Moment is working with have built unwieldy daily financial operations to manage their own complexity. Anecdotally, one merchant maintains a staff of 75 people doing reconciliations for their business – operations that can be automated and streamlined leveraging the Moment platform. Moment presents a vast opportunity in simplifying that process, automating it, while enabling customers to focus on their core business and customer relationships.
Africa is the largest single opportunity in the world. As our population booms over the next 20 years, many new business foundations will need to be laid across the continent – especially in the area of payments.
Payments are the lifeblood of Africa’s economy. Enabling them efficiently and cost-effectively, across the continent, ensures Africa performs to its full potential. Through the partnership with MultiChoice, Moment is well positioned to be at the core of this transformation for decades to come.
