A brand-new look: Behind MFS Africa’s new logo and what it means.
This week MFS Africa relaunched our brand with a cleaner, sharper logo, and a pop of optimistic yellow.
Why the change?
When we started MFS Africa over a decade ago, we knew that big changes were afoot. Mobile technology was changing everything, and there was even more hope and enthusiasm about what mobile money can be. But as much as making domestic money transfer simpler, better, and cheaper was in sharp focus, very few people paid attention to the even more broken cross border payments within Africa. And it certainly wasn’t as easy as it should have been.
We live in a world where borders increasingly don’t dictate the way we live our lives — particularly when it comes to communication. Your phone lets you text a friend in Djibouti, pop an email to Nairobi and call a relative in Lagos.
The same should be true for sending and receiving money.
And so, our rallying cry was born: Making borders matter less.
At first, we wanted to change everything, armed with that belief. By linking mobile money networks across borders, there wasn’t an industry we couldn’t touch: Agriculture, health, energy and more.
But we quickly realised we needed to focus on our core strength: interoperability — connecting mobile money networks in individual countries so that the end consumer could send and receive money efficiently and quickly no matter the country they were dealing with.
Fast-forward to today and MFS Africa is the largest mobile money operator on the continent, linking some 320 million mobile wallets.
Our rallying cry remains: Making borders matter less.
It’s reflected in the cropped lines of our new logo and in the way we work — bridging over thirty different markets and navigating the regulation in each to make cross border payments easier. It’s in the very spirit of the strategy that has seen us partner with like-minded companies across the continent, to transform their individual industries. By making interoperability possible, these use cases were able to blossom, and we’re thrilled to be able to invest in companies pursuing a similar vision through our MFS Africa Frontiers vehicle.
Our new branding reflects this sharper sense of purpose.
Our vision remains the same. The only thing that has changed is the scale of that vision.
Several years ago, we operated in fewer than 10 countries; today we have done the hard yards in terms of regulatory compliance and technical networking to be present in over 30. Five years ago, we had a few key partners. Today that number is almost 200.
We are bent on growing because the bigger our network, and the more markets we cover, the greater the value we can bring to each of our partners. They in turn can empower their end customers and connect Africans to the digital economy.
For too long Africans have had to jump through ridiculous hoops to simply send money to a relative or make a payment to another country. Financial exclusion doesn’t just mean exorbitant fees to move one’s money. It means ones’ very world shrinks; opportunities are fewer and access to goods and services is severely curtailed.
The sooner we can change that, the sooner we dramatically shift the trajectory of economies, industries, and lives across the continent.
We want to see a fisherman in Togo send money to his family in Ghana at the press of a button. We want to see a TikTok creator in Zambia easily receive payment for her creativity from international sponsors. We want to help companies like Iroko offer their services to people across the continent without traditional bank accounts or cards. We want to help a tailor in Conakry flog his suits to customers near and far, without limiting himself to lines arbitrarily drawn on a map hundreds of years ago.
We are enlivened by the idea that making borders matter less when it comes to payments can transform the way we work, earn and live.
By giving Africans financial access, we are delivering on our ultimate goal: to create greater prosperity across the continent.
Welcome to MFS Africa 3.0.
