Airtel MoMo earns 0.728% on every dollar it processes. M-Pesa earns 0.438%. MTN MoMo, 0.396%. You'd read Airtel's higher take rate as the stronger business. It's closer to the opposite. In mobile money, withdrawal fees are the high-margin line. A customer tolerates a fee on a once-a-month cash-out that they'd never accept on every merchant payment. So a high blended take rate is the signature of a book still dominated by expensive basic transactions, a business monetising the turnstile rather than the loop. This is the trap at the centre of the whole industry. A telco mobile money business is most profitable precisely when it is least mature. The one earning the fattest spread is the one still doing the most cash conversion. But the direction of travel for all three is away from exactly that, toward ecosystems where money circulates and the cash-out moment becomes rare. So maturity is self-cannibalising. As an operator deepens, it trades its most profitable activity for thinner merchant flows. M-Pesa's take rate has fallen from 93bp to 60bp, not weakness, but the arithmetic of a turnstile becoming a loop. And the second act that was meant to rescue the margin never arrived. Lending was supposed to re-rate a payments business into something richer. Yet M-Pesa books financial services at under 6% of revenue after $11bn through Fuliza. It's a rounding error at MTN. Airtel won't disclose it. This is why the market values @CapitecBankSA at $1,154 per user and MTN MoMo at $109. One is a full-stack bank. The others are fee-on-transfer rails priced accordingly. Mobile money is approaching its twentieth year; old enough to be infrastructure rather than innovation. And infrastructure that grows only with the population it serves is infrastructure waiting to be repriced or routed around. Full analysis (Link in Comments)👇

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Are phone to phone payments foreshadowing p2p payments on open protocols? @CashApp