African payment aggregator PawaPay can now onboard merchants directly in Mozambique after its local subsidiary, Quidexplus Mozambique, secured a payment service provider (PSP) licence from the Bank of Mozambique.
The licence enables the firm to directly onboard commercial merchants and manage end-to-end payment operations across Mozambique's rapidly expanding mobile money ecosystem.
The regulatory approval fundamentally transforms PawaPay's operating strategy in the Mozambican market, country director for Mozambique Ilídio Matchebe told ITWeb Africa.
"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," Matchebe said.
He added that holding a direct local licence under central bank supervision allows the company to guarantee end-to-end service quality and significantly scale up its local capital investment.
“This means we can invest more heavier in the market than we had done before,” he highlighted.
The PSP licence grants PawaPay direct merchant acquiring capabilities across more than 12 million active mobile money accounts in Mozambique, where mobile wallets far outpace traditional bank accounts.
Matchebe confirmed that PawaPay is already fully integrated with the nation’s primary mobile wallet networks—Vodacom's M-PESA and Movitel's e-Mola—to process collections and payouts, while advanced discussions are underway to expand inbound remittance corridors.
Enterprise merchants operating in Mozambique have historically faced friction managing separate operator relationships, dispute reconciliations, and customer support across multiple mobile network operators.
By connecting Mozambique into its unified single-API architecture—which integrates mobile money rails across 23 African markets—PawaPay aims to streamline payment management for global ride-hailing networks, e-commerce platforms, remittance providers, and non-governmental organisations.
While current operations focus on local collections and disbursements, Matchebe noted that operating under central bank oversight delivers the institutional compliance required by major enterprise clients to process high-volume digital payments.
As its next growth phase, PawaPay is actively engaging regulators and operators to expand into international remittance processing in the country.
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