PawaPay has obtained a payment service provider (PSP) licence from the Bank of Mozambique for its local subsidiary Quidexplus Mozambique, enabling the company to sign up Mozambican merchants directly.
The licence allows PawaPay to process payments under the central bank’s supervision and the firm says merchant onboarding will begin in the coming days.
Founded in 2020, PawaPay offers businesses a single API that connects to mobile-money wallets in 23 African countries, removing the need for separate agreements with each operator.
Mozambique’s mobile-money market is served by three operators – M-Pesa from Vodacom, e-Mola from Movitel and mKesh from Tmcel – and the Bank of Mozambique recorded 24.6 million mobile-money accounts at the end of November 2025, almost four times the 6.7 million bank accounts.
PawaPay reports that more than 12 million of those accounts are active and that its developer documentation already lists Mozambique with connections to Vodacom’s M-Pesa and Movitel’s e-Mola, the latter marked as payouts only, while mKesh is not listed.
“Merchants have had no reliable way to operate here at scale,” said Ilídio Matchebe, Mozambique Country Director at PawaPay, adding that the new licence changes the entity merchants sign with.
Mozambique’s payment-services framework, updated by Law 15/2026 of July 2, 2026, classifies PSPs as payment aggregators, the category that fits PawaPay’s business model.
PawaPay is in advanced talks with M-Pesa, e-Mola and international remittance providers to expand inbound payment flows into Mozambique.
The company recently secured a Central Bank of Kenya licence for Quidexplus Kenya Limited, listed among 44 PSPs and first licensed on June 17, 2026, and processes around 7 million transactions a day across its 23-country footprint, totalling more than 3.5 billion transactions since launch.
