The government intends to tax the commissions of agents and Electronic Money Institutions (EMIs), which already have almost 20 million accounts, according to official information quoted this Friday, 14th March, by the Lusa news agency.
According to an Executive document on the actions taken in 2024, the government made progress last year with the process of ‘taxing the commissions’ of agents and EMIs, having drawn up the respective bill, which it has since submitted to the Portuguese Parliament, although without providing any further details.
It adds, however, that ‘data on their agents and superagents at national level has been made available’ by two of the mobile wallet institutions, in order to create a database, with a view to broadening the tax base and consequently increasing revenue collection in this segment of the digital economy.
A total of 787 mobile wallet agents were also registered, ‘having been assigned a NUIT (tax identification number) and started operating’.
Mozambique currently has three Electronic Money Institutions, owned by the three mobile telecoms operators, which provide financial services via mobile phone, including money transfers between customers or payment for services.
This is a solution that makes it easier and more widespread for the population to access financial services, using only mobile phones and EMI agents on the street.
The number of EMI agents in the country increased by 12.2 per cent in the first half of 2024, to more than 252,000, covering all 154 districts of the country.
Lusa reported this week that the number of bank accounts in Mozambique grew by 10 per cent in 2024, to a record 6.2 million, but in EMIs there are already more than three times as many, according to data from the central bank.
According to a statistical report by the Bank of Mozambique, the number of bank accounts in the country grew from 5.6 million at the end of 2023 to 6.2 million in December last year, but this is not keeping pace with the increase in EMIs, which grew by 18.5 per cent in the same period, to 19.8 million, almost three million more new accounts in the space of a year.
Four years earlier, in 2020, the number of these e-money accounts was almost half, at 10.8 million.
