Mobile money has moved from a convenience for urban smartphone users to the primary financial tool for millions of Cameroonians who have never held a traditional bank account. Transaction volumes have kept climbing, and fintech startups are now racing to extend services, savings products, micro-loans, and merchant payments, into rural areas long underserved by brick-and-mortar banks.
Agent networks, the local shopkeepers and kiosk operators who handle cash-in and cash-out transactions, remain the backbone of the system outside major cities. Expanding that network reliably, with enough float and connectivity, is the main bottleneck fintechs describe when scaling beyond Douala and Yaoundé.
Regulators have also taken a more active interest, working on interoperability rules so that transfers between different mobile money providers work as smoothly as transfers within the same network, a change users have requested for years.