MTN Nigeria Shareholders Vote on ₦95.5bn Fintech Spin-Off — MoMo Control Goes to South African Parent

MTN Nigeria shareholders are voting today on a restructuring deal that will hand control of its mobile money operations to South African parent MTN Group. The vote, held as part of the company’s Annual General Meeting on April 30, centres on a transaction valued at ₦95.5 billion.

Under the arrangement, MTN Group — through its fintech investment arm — will inject ₦152.06 billion ($110.54 million) in exchange for a 60% stake in two entities: MoMo Payment Service Bank Limited and Y’ello Digital Financial Services Limited (YDFS). MTN Nigeria retains the remaining 40%. Both parties then consolidate their interests under a new CBN-regulated holding company.

Why MTN Nigeria Is Doing This

The company’s argument is straightforward: scaling mobile payments, remittances, and agent networks requires outside capital. MTN Nigeria has been funding its fintech unit alone, and that approach has limits. Bringing in the parent as a majority investor shares the funding burden and frees up capital to reinvest in core network infrastructure.

KPMG independently assessed the deal and issued a fairness opinion on the ₦95.5 billion valuation — pegged on a debt-free, cash-free basis. According to MTN Nigeria, that valuation represents a 2.1 times premium to the fintech units’ carrying value as of December 2025. So the company is arguing it isn’t selling cheap.

What Shareholders Give Up

Existing shareholdings in MTN Nigeria remain unchanged, the company says — investors will continue to hold the same equity they hold today. What changes is who controls the fintech subsidiary. MoMo, which has struggled to gain traction against the dominance of bank-backed mobile money players, would now be backed by MTN Group’s global fintech ambitions and deeper pockets.

The deal does raise questions. Handing majority control of Nigeria’s mobile money infrastructure to a foreign parent company — at a moment when regulators are trying to grow domestic fintech ownership — is a choice that not everyone on the shareholder list or in regulatory circles will be comfortable with. Whether the CBN-regulated holding structure provides enough oversight is worth watching.

If shareholders approve today, the transaction moves to regulatory sign-off. If they don’t, MTN Nigeria faces the harder question of how it funds MoMo’s next phase of growth on its own.

Sources: TechCabal, Business Post, Arbiterz