Mastercard and Moovn Sign 5-Year East Africa Deal

In Short

• Mastercard and Moovn Technologies signed a five-year strategic partnership to expand digital payments across East Africa.
• The deal is focused on prepaid cards, online and in-app payments, digital wallets, and cross-border money transfers.
• The first rollout focus is Kenya and Tanzania through a merchant payments push called Pay Local.

What Happened

Mastercard and Moovn Technologies have signed a five-year deal to expand digital payments services across East Africa. The partnership will integrate Mastercard’s payment infrastructure into MoovnPay, which is Moovn’s payments product.

In practice, this means Moovn plans to offer both virtual and physical prepaid Mastercard cards. A prepaid card is a card you load money onto before spending, similar to airtime top-ups but for card payments. The companies also plan to support online checkout and in-app payment acceptance for merchants, peer-to-peer transfers, and eligible international remittances.

Moovn says the integration will also connect to its wider platforms across mobility, logistics, e-commerce, and merchant tools. The target users include drivers, riders, small businesses, and consumers who want to pay and get paid in one place.

MoovnPay and Shooga will sit at the center of the combined wallet setup. Shooga is Moovn’s financial inclusion platform for peer-to-peer payments, fundraising, and donations. Users are expected to access prepaid cards through a single digital wallet, while participating merchants accept payments directly from MoovnPay users.

Why It Matters

East Africa is already heavily mobile money-led, but card payments and online acceptance still lag for many SMEs. Mastercard cited its 2026 SME Confidence Index, which found 95% of Kenyan SMEs accept mobile payments, and 80% say simple and user-friendly payment methods matter for growth.

For Moovn, plugging into Mastercard’s global network could make it easier to scale card issuing, merchant acceptance, and cross-border transfers. For merchants in Kenya and Tanzania, Pay Local could reduce friction for customers who prefer cards or wallet-based checkout, especially for app-based mobility and e-commerce use cases.