MultiChoice Group is diversifying into fintech. Through a partnership with global venture capital firm General Catalyst and payments specialist Rapyd, the JSE-listed broadcaster launched Moment in 2023 to process DStv and Showmax payments. But it’s becoming much more than that.
According to Craig Coetzer, group executive head for delivery and operations at MultiChoice, Moment has far greater ambitions than simply being an internally focused service provider.
“Right now, we are busy with the implementation of the initial opportunity to rationalise and simplify our payments landscape, getting the payments ecosystem for MultiChoice South Africa and MultiChoice for the rest of Africa fully integrated into the Moment payments network,” Coetzer told TechCentral in a recent interview.
“Once this initial, internally focused implementation is completed, we will essentially have built out one of the deepest and broadest payment networks across the African continent, and that unlocks potential opportunities for other large enterprises that could benefit from leveraging the Moment payments network,” he said.
Coetzer said the evolution of financial services in Africa has led to a diversified payments landscape, with digital wallets, cards, cash and other payment methods all playing important roles in facilitating transactions. Moment wants to be a payment aggregator that will allow individuals and businesses to transact without having to worry about whether they are paying from a digital wallet to a bank, or card to a mobile wallet, or any other combination of digital money types.
Fuelling Moment’s optimism are World Bank projections that by 2050, Africa’s population will have grown from the current 1.5 billion to 2.5 billion, with more young Africans than the rest of the world combined projected to enter the workforce each year from around 2035.
Next phase
MultiChoice believes is it well positioned to support the adjacent boom in economic activity through its payments infrastructure. “The opportunity exists to simplify and rationalise payments across the continent and MultiChoice is well positioned to serve that purpose,” said Coetzer.
In its ambitions, Moments is pitting itself against a range of start-ups, including Nigeria’s Flutterwave, which is expanding its reach in Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana and South Africa as an API (application programming interface) platform for various types of payment solutions.
But the payment integration space also has various jurisdictions approaching the problem at a regional level. In Southern Africa, for example, the Southern African Development Community continues to work closely with clearing house BankservAfrica to develop the Transactions Cleared on an Immediate Basis platform (TCIB) launched in 2021.
Read: MTN MoMo expands its Africa remittance network
TCIB allows interoperability between banking solutions, mobile wallets and other fintech solutions for real-time payments. Similar efforts are under way involving the East African Community and the Economic Community of West African States.
According to Coetzer, Moment already functions in 44 African countries, facilitating the collection and disbursement of subscription payments through more than 200 different local payment methods.
Over time, Moment will expand its service offering to other large enterprises in its target market. Coetzer said the payment network’s cost-effectiveness, interoperability with a variety of payment methods and availability across multiple markets are some of the platform’s major draw cards.
“The ability to pay is not anything new; what makes the Moment offering unique is our ability to simplify, rationalise and standardise payments… We want to move businesses and customers from cash to digital by offering users better financial opportunities, lower prices, and higher-quality goods and services,” said Coetzer.
The payments industry, as a subsector of finance, is heavily regulated the world over. Adherence to a deluge of regulatory regimes is one of the major challenges threatening the success of multi-market operators like Moment. Coetzer said Moment leveraged MultiChoice’s 40-year history and the relationships the broadcaster has built with regulators to streamline its regulatory compliance efforts.
Relationships with various payment service providers on the continent had a similar effect on Moment’s ability to integrate quickly with banking apps and digital wallets in each jurisdiction.
The scale of Moment’s operations requires robust infrastructure that can handle spikes in volume. Coetzer said Moment relies on cloud infrastructure to scale effectively when required.
In MultiChoice Group’s interim results for the six months to 30 September 2023, Moment was reported to have a post-money evaluation of US$82-million following a seed-funding round in May 2024 with MultiChoice Group holding a 30.8% interest post-close.
Read: Vodacom processing R23-billion/day in mobile money transactions
“Since its launch in the second half of 2023, Moment delivered a sharp ramp-up in total payment volume to over $240-million in the first half of 2024, compared to less than $1-million in 2023. Over 95% of Moment’s total payment volumes were driven by payment flows from MultiChoice South Africa and Showmax South Africa as the group migrates its existing payment volumes and third-party payment integrations onto the Moment platform,” said MultiChoice. – © 2025 NewsCentral Media
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