Capitec Bank, South Africa’s largest retail bank by customer numbers, has launched a partnership with remittance fintech Mama Money in a significant move to overhaul the cross-border payment landscape for the country’s large migrant population.
The integration embeds Mama Money’s international transfer service directly into Capitec’s mobile banking app, giving its more than 24 million clients a cheaper and faster way to send money home. The collaboration targets a critical and often underserved segment of the market: migrants from countries like Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi, and Kenya who have historically faced remittance fees as high as 12% and multi-day waiting periods.
This bank-fintech tie-up is a noteworthy example of embedded finance in an emerging market, where a large incumbent institution opts to integrate a specialist’s technology rather than build its own competing product.
For a fee starting from 5%, Capitec clients can now send funds in minutes. The process generates a 12-digit “Universal Mama Money Token” sent via SMS to the recipient, who can collect the cash from a network of partner banks and agents across more than 70 countries without needing a bank account.
A challenge to the old guard
The partnership directly challenges the expensive and often cumbersome processes of traditional banks and money transfer operators.
“When someone earning minimum wage has to pay R150 in fees to send R1,000 home, that’s money taken directly from a family’s food budget,” said Mathieu Coquillon, co-founder of Mama Money. He argues the collaboration is about more than just technology. “It’s about dignity and fairness for people who work hard to support their families.”
For Capitec, the move is a strategic expansion of its “simple, affordable and transparent” banking philosophy into the multi-billion-rand remittance space.
“We live on a connected continent, where the age-old tradition of supporting family and community is a fundamental part of our culture,” said Francois Viviers, Group Executive of Marketing and Communications at Capitec. “Our clients work hard for their money, and they deserve a solution that safely and affordably delivers more of that money to where it’s meant to go.”
A strategic play built on momentum
This is not Mama Money’s first major partnership aimed at leveraging existing platforms for financial inclusion. Last year, the fintech, which has over 720,000 users, teamed up with Access Bank and card issuer Paymentology to launch a bank card service managed entirely through WhatsApp.
That service allowed users, many of whom face data cost barriers, to perform international transfers, buy utilities, and manage their accounts via the popular messaging app.
The new Capitec deal represents a massive scaling of this strategy. By integrating with South Africa’s dominant digital bank, Mama Money gains access to a vast, established customer base, while Capitec can instantly offer a best-in-class remittance service without the development costs and time-to-market of building it from scratch.
The partnership highlights a growing trend where agile fintechs, with their deep understanding of niche user needs, become indispensable technology partners for large financial institutions looking to innovate and expand their service offerings. For South Africa’s 2.4 million migrants — over a million of whom are women — it signals a tangible shift towards more accessible and equitable financial services.