Tanzania is not the African fintech market that makes headlines. That distinction has long belonged to Nigeria, with its scale and regulatory turbulence, and Kenya, with Safaricom’s dominant M-Pesa infrastructure. But on March 17, 2026, Tanzania did something neither of those markets had managed: it launched Africa’s first mobile money tap-to-pay feature — and in doing so, signalled that the continent’s contactless payments story may have a different lead character than most observers assumed.
The launch, delivered through a partnership between Vodacom Tanzania, M-Pesa Africa, payment processor Paymentology, and Visa, allows M-Pesa customers to tap their Android phones at any Visa-enabled point-of-sale terminal — locally and internationally — without a physical card. The capability is built on M-Pesa’s Visa Virtual Card, with Paymentology handling cloud-based issuer processing and tokenisation. Tanzania did not just adopt a new payment feature. It piloted a model that the rest of the M-Pesa network — including Kenya — is now expected to follow.
The Numbers Behind the Story
BETAR’s coverage of East African payments has, like much of the industry press, concentrated on Safaricom. That concentration obscures how rapidly Tanzania’s mobile money ecosystem has matured.
By December 2025, Tanzania had 76.5 million mobile money accounts — a 21 percent increase from 63.2 million the year before. The Bank of Tanzania’s 2024 Payment Systems Report recorded 6.41 billion transactions, up 26.73 percent year-on-year, with total value rising 28.54 percent to TZS 198,859 billion. A separate Visa survey found that 84 percent of Tanzanian SMEs had adopted digital payments within the previous two years — a penetration rate that suggests merchant-side infrastructure has kept pace with consumer adoption. The country’s telecoms regulator, TCRA, reported 90.4 million total telecom subscriptions in Q1 2025, with 5G coverage reaching 30 percent of the country by Q4 2025.
Tanzania’s mobile money market is also competitive in ways Kenya’s is not. M-Pesa, operated by Vodacom Tanzania, holds approximately 41 percent market share by subscription. Mixx by Yas (formerly Tigo Pesa), Airtel Money, and HaloPesa account for most of the remainder, with the top three operators collectively controlling around 89 percent of the market. Airtel Money processed 119.4 million transactions in Q4 2025 alone, up from 106.7 million in the same period of 2024.
“This launch reflects our shared commitment to making payments simpler, safer and more accessible for millions,” said Epimack Mbeteni, M-PESA Director at Vodacom Tanzania.
Why Tanzania Got Here First
The question is not just what Tanzania launched — it is why Tanzania, and not Kenya, launched it first.
Safaricom’s M-Pesa holds roughly 70 percent of Kenya’s mobile money market. That dominance creates inertia: Safaricom has an interest in defending its existing payment ecosystem, which includes Lipa Na M-Pesa QR codes deeply embedded in merchant infrastructure across Kenya. The company’s relationship with M-Pesa Africa, the Vodacom-Safaricom joint entity that owns the M-Pesa brand in multiple markets, is also one of shared infrastructure rather than uniform deployment priority.
Tanzania’s multi-operator market provided more room to manoeuvre. Vodacom Tanzania is the M-Pesa operating entity in Tanzania, and as a proving ground for a feature that requires coordinated rollout with Visa and a third-party processor, Tanzania’s mix of high mobile money penetration, fragmented competition, and NFC-ready merchant infrastructure made it the natural first deployment.
The Bank of Tanzania also moved earlier on the regulatory framing. A 2023 BoT circular established contactless transaction limits — TZS 100,000 per domestic transaction with a daily ceiling of TZS 400,000, and USD 100 per cross-border transaction with a USD 200 daily limit — designed explicitly to manage fraud risk in contactless payments before widespread adoption. That regulatory scaffolding was in place before the March 2026 launch.
Anna Porra, Chief Revenue Officer at Paymentology, put the market logic directly: “Innovations like tap-to-pay accelerate financial inclusion by making everyday transactions simpler and safer.” The company’s release described Tanzania’s rapid mobile money adoption and cross-border trade dynamics as making it “the perfect proving ground.”
The Infrastructure Layer: TAN-QR and the Banking Sector
Tanzania’s contactless progress is not only about NFC. The country established the TAN-QR unified code standard, which enables merchants to receive payments from any provider — M-Pesa, Airtel Money, Tigo Pesa, CRDB Bank, NMB — through a single QR code. In a market where multi-wallet households are common, merchant-side interoperability matters.
Tanzania’s two largest commercial banks are embedded in this ecosystem. CRDB Bank, the country’s largest by assets at TZS 16.04 trillion, operates merchant payment products that use both QR and NFC infrastructure. NMB Bank (TZS 13.39 trillion in assets) similarly provides digital payment channels for merchant customers. Between them, CRDB and NMB account for nearly half the country’s total banking sector assets of TZS 79.4 trillion and are significant drivers of POS terminal rollout outside urban Dar es Salaam.
This bank-telecom coordination distinguishes Tanzania’s payments stack from Kenya’s, where Safaricom’s M-Pesa has largely absorbed the function that banks might otherwise play in the payments layer.
The EAC Connection
Tanzania’s contactless push does not exist in a regional vacuum. In May 2025, the East African Community’s Monetary Affairs Committee approved the EAC Cross-Border Payment System Masterplan, a framework for financial integration across member states that includes harmonised mobile money regulation, mutual recognition of PSP licences, and a regional instant retail payment switch.
Rwanda and Tanzania have already moved toward the cross-border element: RSwitch, Rwanda’s national payment switch, is in early integration with Tanzania’s TIPS (Tanzania Instant Payments System) to enable real-time cross-border transactions via bank or mobile money accounts — a bilateral pilot that is the EAC’s first concrete implementation step under the Masterplan.
The Kenya-Rwanda PSP passporting MOU — signed in March 2026 — represents the other leading bilateral implementation under that framework. Tanzania’s advanced mobile money infrastructure and BoT’s existing contactless regulatory framework position it as a credible candidate for similar arrangements. A country that has already piloted Africa’s first mobile money tap-to-pay, with contactless limits already codified in regulation, is better placed to enter a regional payments interoperability framework than one still building those foundations.
A Hardware Ceiling
The tap-to-pay launch comes with a caveat. NFC-enabled contactless payments require mid-to-high-tier Android smartphones — hardware that a significant proportion of Tanzania’s mobile money user base does not currently hold. Feature phones and entry-level smartphones, which account for a substantial share of Tanzania’s 90.4 million telecom subscriptions, do not support the technology. The March 2026 launch is, at present, a product for the urban middle class and above.
Meagan Rabe of Visa Sub-Saharan Africa framed the ambition in appropriately long-horizon terms: “This partnership is establishing tap-to-pay as a widely adopted payment solution for daily transactions.” The word “establishing” is doing real work in that sentence. QR codes and paybill numbers will remain the dominant payment method for most Tanzanians for years to come — the tap-to-pay launch is an infrastructure investment in the market Tanzania is building toward, not a description of the market it has today.
What Tanzania’s Lead Signals
The March 2026 tap-to-pay launch is a data point in a longer trend. Tanzania’s mobile money transaction growth rate, its multi-operator competitive structure, its banking sector’s integration with mobile payment rails, and its early regulatory move on contactless limits have combined to make it a more dynamic payments market than its coverage profile suggests.
The country’s fintech story is not Nigeria’s — it is not built on the drama of CBN policy reversals, USSD fee disputes, or large-cap valuations. And it is not Kenya’s — it does not have one dominant operator building a super-app that absorbs adjacent services. Tanzania’s payments evolution is messier, more distributed, and, in at least one measurable way, further ahead.
For coverage that defaults to Lagos and Nairobi, Tanzania’s March 2026 milestone is a correction signal. The East Africa payments story is not a two-country story.
— Technology Desk, BETAR.africa
