M-pesa, the mobile wallet service company owned by mobile phone operator Vodacom Mozambique, assures that the financial transaction facilities it offers do not create risks of money laundering and terrorist financing in the north of the country.
The managers of the M-pesa mobile wallet service also say that the measures imposed to prevent money laundering include the availability of an articulate team and investment in systems and models to detect possible centres of money laundering and terrorist financing.
‘Our transactions today are extremely secure, even with our actions we can identify at any moment what the origins are and we carry out these analyses,’ said M-pesa’s general director, Sérgio Gomes.
The new Chairman of the Board of Directors, Salimo Abdula, emphasised that M-pesa opts for security compliance and the observance of security rules that often even hinder the company’s growth.
‘But we’re not going to give up our hand in this [security] compliance,’ he said, adding that one of the illustrative points is the limits on transactions through M-pesa, which currently stand at 25,000 meticals per day (around 392 dollars), and that the company’s shareholders won’t accept the extension before ensuring that all security protocols have been observed.
M-pesa, a service that has been available in Mozambique since 2013 and whose board of directors is headed by Salimo Abdula, a Mozambican businessman, has already handled more than a billion meticals in economic transactions.
It should be noted that the Mozambican government is currently endeavouring to combat the money laundering and terrorist financing that has plagued the province of Cabo Delgado since October 2017.
Currently, despite progress towards removing the country from this list, Mozambique has been on the ‘grey list’ of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) for about a year, after shortcomings were detected in the fight against money laundering and terrorist financing.
At the time, the FATF drew up a list of recommendations that Mozambique had to comply with in order to be removed from the ‘grey list’, 11 of which were considered ‘urgent’.
AIM
