Nicolas Pichou, the general manager of the Cameroonian subsidiary of the French banking giant Société Générale, has announced the end of the YUP adventure in a statement to all of his staff on March 1, 2022. This banking firm started a mobile money service in Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Guinea, Ghana, and Madagascar in 2017.

“Dear colleagues, The AFMO Business Unit (Africa and the Middle East, editor’s note), which is focused on promoting financial inclusion and facilitating access to innovative transactional and financial means, in particular by dematerializing business payment flows, launched an electronic money service and established a dedicated YUP entity five years ago. Despite all of the efforts made by the YUP teams across the 7 geographies involved, including Cameroon, to increase market share and improve the experience, the service has not been able to create a viable model, and market prospects do not allow us to envision its continuation. Faced with this circumstance, the Societe Generale group has made the painful decision, in conjunction with all of Societe Generale’s local subsidiaries, to suspend all of YUP’s activities in all of the geographies where it had been deployed,” says SG Cameroon’s CEO to his workers.

In other words, despite the efforts made over the last five years to capture a piece of Cameroon’s thriving mobile money market, Societe Generale’s YUP offer has proven to be unprofitable. It’s due to the overwhelming dominance of the country’s two leading mobile operators, MTN and Orange, in this market. These operators have had time to network the Cameroonian territory, which leaves little opportunity for newcomers, having entered the mobile money industry over ten years before YUP.

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More Than 19 Million Accounts In Cameroon

This domination is such that, in July 2021, when Orange Cameroon celebrated the 10th anniversary of its Orange Money service, it claimed 70 percent of the mobile money market share, with monthly cumulative transactions of 800 billion FCFA. 

“When I say “cumulative values of transactions,” I’m referring to deposits and withdrawals, money transfers, bill payments, salaries, and other merchant payments, among other things. Every day, we process roughly 3 million transactions,” Emmanuel Tassembedo, director of Orange Money Cameroon, noted on the occasion. 

At MTN, where this broad market dominance claimed by Orange is taken with a lot of tweezers, managers rather recall that MTN Mobile Money had 5.6 million active customers in the 2nd quarter of 2021, at least 168,000 points of presence at across the country, including 108,000 merchant points and 60,000 distribution points. 

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MTN Mobile Money and Orange Money have also innovative services such as the subscription to an insurance policy, or the payment of taxes and duties via the mobile phone, a channel through which the Cameroonian tax authorities have collected payments of nearly 10 billion FCFA in 2021, according to the Minister of Finance.

As a reminder, Cameroon is the leader in mobile money in the CEMAC zone (Cameroon, Congo, Gabon, Chad, CAR and Equatorial Guinea). According to data from the Beac, the issuing institute of the six countries of this community space, in 2020, Cameroon alone had 19.1 million mobile money accounts, or 64.8% of the 30.1 million accounts identified in CEMAC during the period.

“In terms of number of transactions, payment service providers in Cameroon carry out 73.13% of community transactions”, reveals the Beac report on the mobile money market in the CEMAC space in 2020.

YUP Cameroon mobile money YUP Cameroon mobile money

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Charles Rapulu Udoh

Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer who has advised startups across Africa on issues such as startup funding (Venture Capital, Debt financing, private equity, angel investing etc), taxation, strategies, etc. He also has special focus on the protection of business or brands’ intellectual property rights ( such as trademark, patent or design) across Africa and other foreign jurisdictions.
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He is also an award-winning writer