African banks and mobile companies offering digital and mobile finance services are increasingly widening their agent networks by roping in retailers, airtime distributors and businesses, experts said this week.

Mobile money and digital finance is taking root across most African countries. Banks have also upped their game, clawing back some of the ground lost to mobile money operators - despite robust development of such platforms by telecom operators.

A new report, Designing Successful Distribution Strategies for Digital Money, released by the Helix Institute of Digital Finance this week says "mobile operators (such as M-Sente in Uganda) have sought to extend the scope of their GSM airtime distributor channel and put mobile money under it".

However, Mike McCaffrey and Ignacio Mas, who co-authored the Helix Institute report, say it is "important to manage the incentives of airtime distributors so that they take an active role in promoting the new mobile money service".

Zambia's Zanaco Bank now has 290 digital and mobile money agents across the country. The bank is establishing about 30 new agents a month, according to the report.

"Zanaco does, however, use retail organisations with multiple sites as agents, such as PostNet which has 20 electronic top-up and bill payment outlets," says the report.

Airtel Uganda had also tried to use the airtime distributors as agents for its mobile money offering. By the end of last year, Airtel Money had "21,000 active agents on a 30-day basis and two million active customers" on a similar 30-day basis.

"Airtel Money did initially examine the possibility of using the GSM distributors at this early stage as well, but the distributors were not willing to commit to a new product they did not understand, which had lower margins than selling airtime.

"However, once they saw the stand-alone model working without them, some distributors started to understand the potential and came on board," adds the report.