Mozambique runs a national payment switch and a fast-growing mobile money market, but open banking is not yet on the agenda. The Bank of Mozambique connects banks and wallets through SIMO, the national switch, and the country is part of the Southern African regional payment systems. The interoperability groundwork is being laid; the open banking rules are not.
Digital finance in Mozambique is led by mobile money, with M-Pesa and mKesh the main wallets reaching millions of people well beyond the formal banking sector. Connecting these networks is SIMO, the national payment switch, which links banks and mobile money operators so payments can move across the system. That interoperability layer is the same foundation open banking depends on.
The regulator is the Bank of Mozambique. Its focus is payments modernisation and financial stability rather than data sharing. As a member of the Southern African Development Community, Mozambique is connected to the region’s payment systems: SADC-RTGS, the real-time settlement system run by the South African Reserve Bank, and TCIB, the low-value cross-border instant payment scheme that bridges into the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System.
There is no open banking framework in Mozambique and no published roadmap. The priority is deepening the use of SIMO and mobile money and broadening financial inclusion, not writing rules for consent-based data sharing. The honest position is early-stage, with interoperability further along than open banking.
For Mozambique, the signal to watch is how fully SIMO integrates banks and mobile money and how the country’s regional links develop. A national switch sitting alongside a large mobile money base is a strong foundation, and once interoperability is the norm, the move toward open banking becomes a smaller step.
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Open Banking Nigeria (Open Technology Foundation) is a non-profit backed by a group of industry experts across banking, fintech, risk management, and more to drive and launch the open banking standard in Nigeria.
