PawaPay Gets Mozambique PSP Licence to Onboard Merchants

In Short

PawaPay has secured a Payment Service Provider licence in Mozambique. The approval comes from the Bank of Mozambique through its local subsidiary, Quidexplus Mozambique.

What Happened

PawaPay said the new Mozambique PSP licence lets it onboard merchants directly in the country and provide regulated payment services.

A PSP licence is a regulator-issued approval to offer payment services, such as collecting and routing customer payments for businesses. In simple terms, it is the permission a payments company needs to operate formally under local rules.

With the licence, PawaPay can connect merchants to the mobile money services Mozambican customers already use. Mobile money is a phone-based wallet that works like a stored-value account, often linked to a SIM card.

Mozambique has more than 12 million active mobile money accounts across three operators, M-Pesa (Vodacom), E-Mola (Movitel), and mKesh (Tmcel. PawaPay’s Mozambique country director said the licence addresses a long-standing challenge for merchants that want to accept mobile money at scale.

The company operates across 23 African markets. It says it processes around 7 million transactions per day for customers in ride-hailing, remittances, retail, and NGOs, and has processed more than 3.5 billion transactions since it was founded in 2020.

Why It Matters

For merchants, direct onboarding can reduce reliance on intermediaries and speed up time to start accepting mobile money payments. It can also improve support and settlement processes because the PSP manages the relationship end to end.

For Mozambique’s payments ecosystem, more licensed PSPs can increase competition in mobile money acceptance and encourage more formal, compliant payment flows. That matters for sectors like retail and remittances that depend on reliable digital payments.

For PawaPay, the licence deepens its regulatory footprint in Africa. That can make it easier to expand services, win larger enterprise customers, and meet compliance requirements when operating across multiple markets.