Mobile Money Interoperability Gateway

The problem

In Congo, as in much of Central Africa, each telecom operator runs its own Mobile Money service with no native gateway between them. Sending money from an MTN Money wallet to an Airtel Money wallet usually means a cash withdrawal followed by a new deposit — with the fees, delays and risks that implies.

This fragmentation directly holds back financial inclusion: small merchants and households receiving transfers from different operators (family in a rural area, an employer, a customer) have to juggle multiple wallets, or lose part of the transferred value to informal conversion fees.

Our approach

We started from the interoperability standards already documented by the GSMA for Mobile Money, testing them against the real constraints of the Congolese market: network latency, uneven availability of operator APIs, and the need for a manual reconciliation fallback.

The analysis focused on three specific friction points: the absence of a common identifier across operators, the absence of real-time transaction status on the recipient side, and the absence of a reconciliation mechanism for partial failures — the scenario users fear most.

Technical solution

The concept centres on a central API gateway that translates each operator’s calls into a common format, with a Redis queue absorbing load spikes and replaying transactions after a temporary operator outage.

A reconciliation dashboard tracks the exact status on both the sender and recipient sides for every transaction — with an automatic alert if a discrepancy persists beyond a configurable window, allowing manual intervention before the user loses trust in the service.

A sandbox reproducing each operator’s behaviour allows integration testing without depending on their real-world availability — a critical point given the variability observed in the field.