MTN South Africa has launched a hackathon to challenge “skilled tech developers and innovators” to build solutions on top of its Mobile Money (MoMo) platform.

Exposure of the MoMo application programming interface (API) to developers was teased as a future addition to a revamped MoMo platform by MTN financial services chief Bradwin Roper in an interview with TechCentral last month.

“In South Africa alone, eight million people are registered on the MTN MoMo platform. This massive user base makes it ideal for local talent, developers, companies and entrepreneurs to unlock economic growth through financial and digital solutions in their communities,” said Roper in a statement on Monday.

The hackathon is open from 31 July to 9 October 2023 and spans 15 countries, each with its own prize pool of US$10 000 (R185 000 at the time of writing). MTN encourages developers to build solutions that “promote financial inclusion and literacy in their respective markets”.

Research by the GSMA, which represents most of the world’s mobile operators, shows that although sub-Saharan African African mobile money subscriptions are on the rise – up by 17% to 163 million in 2022 — active 30-day usage remains relatively low at 29%.

Part of the problem, Roper said, is a lack of sophistication in the solutions that mobile money platforms offer to the customers.

MoMo API

Harvesting different solutions from developers may be a good way for MTN to better understand the nuances of the various markets they operate in and find solutions to problems they did not know exist in the mobile money space.