In 2016, Tanzania did something no country had done before. Every major mobile money operator in the country agreed to let their users send money directly to each other. A Vodacom customer could send money to an Airtel customer, an Airtel customer could send to a Tigo customer – all without switching networks. Without a bank in the middle and without paying a third party to bridge the gap. Tanzania mobile money interoperability had arrived, and it changed the rules.
That might sound modest. It is not. At the time, most mobile money ecosystems in the world were closed gardens. Your wallet worked within your network. Tanzania broke that model for the first time, and in doing so, it built something that now has real implications for any business trying to move money there today.
How Tanzania got here
The journey started in September 2014, when Tigo and Airtel signed a bilateral interoperability agreement, the first of its kind between two competing mobile money operators in Africa. The commercial launch followed in February 2015. By December 2014, Tigo had connected with Zantel. Then in February 2016, Vodacom announced it was connecting with both Airtel and Tigo.
By early 2016, Tanzania had achieved something that most African markets are still working toward: full mobile money interoperability across every major operator, on a single shared network.
This did not happen by accident. The Bank of Tanzania pushed for it and the operators agreed. The infrastructure was built in deliberate steps. And the result was a payments ecosystem that now operates on fundamentally different rules than most of its regional peers.
Tanzania Mobile Money Interoperability in Numbers
Fast forward to today and the scale of what Tanzania has built is hard to overstate. The Bank of Tanzania’s Tanzania Instant Payment System, known as TIPS, launched in 2020 as the country’s centralized real-time clearing infrastructure. It connects banks, mobile money operators, and licensed payment providers onto one shared system. In 2024, TIPS processed 454 million transactions, nearly double the 236 million recorded in 2023. The value of those transactions reached TZS 29,820 billion, a 143% increase on the prior year.
Active mobile money accounts tell the same story. By December 2025, 76.5 million active mobile money accounts existed in Tanzania, up 116% from 35.3 million in 2021. 72% of all SIM cards in the country are now linked to mobile money services. Annual transactions across the entire ecosystem grew from 3.75 billion in 2021 to 6.31 billion in 2025.
These are not just consumer statistics. They represent the depth of the underlying rails that every business operating in Tanzania sits on top of.
Here is where it gets practical.
Tanzania mobile money interoperability is a genuine operational advantage for businesses. When you need to pay out to suppliers, agents, or customers across different mobile money networks, you do not need a separate integration for each one. The shared clearing layer handles the routing.
But the infrastructure comes with rules that every business needs to understand before they start.
The first is the TZS requirement. A 2007 Bank of Tanzania regulation requires that all transactions for goods or services conducted within Tanzania be priced in Tanzanian shillings. This has been continuously enforced in the years since. Attempting to invoice in US dollars from within Tanzania is a compliance problem, not just an operational one. Businesses that do not set up proper TZS collections and payouts before they launch will find out the hard way.
The second is the settlement reality for cross-border flows. Tanzania processed 1.3 million cross-border remittance transactions through banks in 2024, a 40.5% increase on the year before. Those flows move through formal banking channels and licensed payment providers. Businesses need the right infrastructure to access those rails compliantly.
The third is the merchant and acceptance side. Merchant acceptance grew 101.99% in 2024, reaching 1.3 million merchants accepting digital payments. Virtual card registrations grew 60.37% to over 820,000 cards, processing $187 million in foreign currency. The market is digitising at pace, and businesses that are not positioned within it will miss the volume as it compounds.
What is coming next
Tanzania’s infrastructure is also beginning to connect outward. The Bank of Tanzania is linking TIPS to Rwanda’s national payment switch, RSwitch, under the Eastern Africa Regional Digital Integration Project. The goal is real-time, low-cost cross-border transfers between Tanzania and Rwanda, with the architecture for a broader East African payments corridor to follow.
The Bank of Tanzania issued 101 payment system licences in 2024, 59 of them to non-bank providers. Africa’s cross-border payments market is currently valued at approximately $329 billion and is projected to reach $1 trillion by 2035. Tanzania’s position inside that corridor matters. The regulatory direction is clear: more participants, more competition, more connectivity.
What this means for your business
Tanzania mobile money interoperability is not just history. The infrastructure built over the last decade, from the first bilateral agreements in 2014 to TIPS processing nearly half a billion transactions in 2024, is the foundation businesses operate on today.
Understanding how those rails work, and how to access them compliantly, is what separates businesses that move money in Tanzania with confidence from those that run into delays and compliance problems after launch.
Fincra is licensed by the Bank of Tanzania as a Payment System Provider. If you are looking to collect or pay out in TZS speak to the team. visit fincra.com
