Mastercard signs five-year deal to add prepaid cards and cross-border transfers to MoovnPay

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Mastercard and Moovn Technologies have signed a five-year agreement to add card, merchant and cross-border payment services to MoovnPay, the digital wallet that sits inside Moovn’s mobility, logistics and e-commerce platforms.

The deal, announced in Nairobi on Monday, October 19, covers Kenya, Tanzania and other African markets. Neither company disclosed the financial terms.

What MoovnPay users will get

Under the agreement, MoovnPay will be able to offer virtual and physical prepaid Mastercard cards, tokenisation, peer-to-peer transfers and eligible cross-border remittances. It will also offer online and in-app payment acceptance through Mastercard Payment Gateway Services (MPGS), which is available through Mastercard Merchant Cloud.

The services are to be built into Moovn’s existing platforms, so riders, drivers, merchants and small businesses who already use them can pay, get paid and move money from one wallet.

Two Moovn products will be at the centre of the rollout: MoovnPay itself and Shooga, Moovn’s financial inclusion service for peer-to-peer payments, fundraising and donations. Users will be able to get Mastercard prepaid cards inside the wallet.

Moovn also plans to widen Pay Local, a service that lets participating merchants take payments directly from MoovnPay users, across Kenya and Tanzania. For money sent abroad, eligible users will be able to use Mastercard Move, the card network’s cross-border transfer service.

From accelerator to commercial rollout

The two firms are not new partners. MoovnPay was picked as one of 11 fintechs in Mastercard’s Start Path Emerging Fintech programme in September 2025. Since then, the companies said, they have moved from early talks into a commercial rollout, including Moovn’s launch of MPGS in Kenya.

The next phase will focus on launching the Shooga prepaid Mastercard range, expanding Pay Local in Kenya and Tanzania, and adding more MPGS, tokenisation and wallet features as Moovn grows in the region. No dates were given for these steps.

“Payments are increasingly woven into the platforms people use every day to travel, work and trade. Moovn has built an ecosystem that brings mobility, commerce and financial services together, and Mastercard’s global network and secure technology will help extend its reach,” said Shehryar Ali, Mastercard’s senior vice president and country manager for East Africa.

Moovn founder and group chief executive Godwin Gabriel said: “Our collaboration with Mastercard is about building more than a payment product. By connecting MoovnPay, Shooga and our mobility, logistics and commerce platforms to trusted global payment capabilities, we are creating an integrated financial and lifestyle ecosystem where participation and trust can unlock greater access, convenience and opportunity for consumers, drivers, merchants and small businesses across Africa.”

The market Mastercard is chasing

In the announcement, Mastercard pointed to a report it commissioned from Genesis Analytics, which projects Africa’s digital payments economy will reach US$1.5 trillion by 2030. It also cited its own 2026 SME Confidence Index, which found that 95 per cent of Kenyan small and medium-sized businesses accept mobile payments and 80 per cent see simple, easy-to-use payment methods as key to their future growth.

Across the continent, the company said, there were 36 live instant payment systems in 31 countries in 2024, handling more than 64 billion transactions worth close to US$2 trillion, according to the AfricaNenda Foundation’s SIIPS 2025 report.

Card networks have been looking for ways into a Kenyan market where most small payments run on mobile money. Local players are also adding new ways to pay at the till; Safaricom and Pesapal, for instance, recently brought dynamic QR and tap-to-pay M-Pesa to shops.

The cross-border element matters for a region where money sent home from abroad is a major source of foreign exchange. Diaspora remittances to Kenya reached $438.5m in September, and fintechs are competing with banks and money transfer firms for a share of those flows.