After years of playing catch-up in Nigeria’s mobile money market, Airtel Nigeria is betting on incentives and physical distribution to force relevance for its mobile money arm, SmartCash.

Since the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) introduced Payment Service Banks (PSBs) in 2018, allowing telcos to offer limited financial services under strict regulatory rules, telecom-led fintechs have struggled to translate telecom scale into financial dominance.

Despite its 60.89 million subscribers and position as Nigeria’s second-largest telco, Airtel’s SmartCash remains a marginal player in mobile money. SmartCash has just 2.2 million users in Nigeria and generated $6 million in revenue as of December 2025.

These numbers are far off from fintech heavyweights like OPay and PalmPay, which already dominate everyday payments, transfers, and deposits. PalmPay’s revenue rose to $63.90 million in 2023, a 31,850% increase from 2020.

Mobile money is Nigeria’s fastest-growing financial services segment. Transactions hit ₦20.71 trillion ($13.49 billion) in Q1 2025, according to data from Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS)—a 1,518.64% jump from Q1 2021.

Regulation has been a major structural constraint. PSBs cannot offer loans, face higher capital requirements, and entered the market late. In a recent CBN fintech report, industry lenders argued that lending restrictions placed on PSBs have limited their competitiveness and growth potential.

Airtel’s reboot strategy

On Airtel Africa’s fiscal Q1 2026 earnings call in July 2025, group chief executive officer Sunil Taldar said the company would continue to rely on its brand, agent network, digital capabilities, and existing customer base to carve out a profitable position in Nigeria’s mobile money market while acknowledging that the market was competitive.

At a media briefing on February 5, 2026, Airtel Nigeria’s CEO, Dinesh Balsingh, expanded on Smartcash’s growth strategy while admitting that the product’s reach remains relatively small.

“These are the three big propositions that we have rolled out. Free transfers, cash back, and savings,” Balsingh told TechCabal. “We are going to be launching a campaign around SmartCash. Just on the wallet side of the business.”

All transfers on the SmartCash platform are currently free, and users receive cashback on airtime recharge, bill payments, and wallet transactions. Transaction cashbacks aim to reward stickiness, and it is not exclusive. Fintech players like OPay continue to offer transaction cashbacks despite their scale.  

To build deposits, SmartCash is also offering a flat 15% annual interest rate on savings, with no tiers, caps, or thresholds. Regardless of the amount, funds placed in the saver’s wallet earn the same rate.

Unlike tiered savings products common across fintech platforms, SmartCash says its model removes complexity and friction by offering a single, uniform interest structure: “Whatever you put into your saver’s wallet gives you 15% interest, no questions asked for the year,” Balsingh told TechCabal.

Beyond incentives, SmartCash is also expanding its infrastructure layer. The platform said it is now integrated with multiple banks and financial institutions, enabling wallet transfers and inter-bank transactions across its network.

Physical distribution remains a core pillar of its expansion strategy. Balsingh said Airtel has deployed nearly 60,000 point-of-sale (PoS) terminals across agent outlets, supermarkets, and merchant locations.

This pales in comparison with fintechs such as OPay and Moniepoint that have built extensive terminal networks to capture market share. Moniepoint alone has over one million deployed terminals, while the number of active PoS terminals in Nigeria grew from under 600,000 in 2021 to nearly six million in 2025, driven largely by fintech expansion.

SmartCash’s PoS terminals are primarily used in Airtel’s retail ecosystem, though the company says it plans to scale usage across broader merchant networks.

In 2025, Airtel also announced plans to launch a virtual card and introduce additional use cases to deepen adoption. But telecom-led fintechs have struggled in Nigeria. MTN’s fintech arm has leaned heavily on airtime lending to grow revenue to ₦131.62 billion ($97.23 million) in the first nine months of 2025.

Their impact continues to pale in comparison with the success of M-Pesa in Kenya, and even Airtel’s own mobile money success in East Africa.

In its The State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money (2024), GSMA, the industry body for telcos, argued that Nigerian telcos’ scale, capital base, and advanced technologies will eventually give them an edge in the mobile money race. It, however, warned that their ability to scale will depend on more than just incentives but on greater regulatory flexibility, which has helped in Kenya, Tanzania, and Ghana.