Botswana's 2024 FinScope survey found that 42% of adults have no bank account, while only 6% are financially excluded altogether. Mobile phone ownership sits at 94%, and 75% of Batswana use mobile money, including a third of those with no bank account.

The gap between those two numbers is the point: a large group of people are using financial products without ever holding a bank account.

The immediate trigger is a product launch. Mukuru has released a Visa-branded Companion Card linked to its wallet, letting customers spend stored funds at any Visa merchant without moving money into a bank account first, and it works across all mobile networks. That matters because a wallet that can only receive and send money still forces a cash-out before groceries, which is where digital money hits the cash economy.

FinScope also found people were pushed out of banking by job losses, irregular income and unemployment, so an unbanked adult is often someone whose financial life does not fit a product built for salaried workers. The same shift is visible at scale elsewhere. MTN Group Fintech has 317 million telecom subscribers but just over 70 million monthly active MoMo users, and processed more than 13 billion transactions worth over $330-billion, roughly R5.6-trillion, in the first half of 2026, originating about 18 loans every second.

Its chief executive, Serigne Dioum, puts the old model on its head: payment is not the first step; it is the last.

TechCabal's Phathisani Moyo argues the next phase of African financial services is about unbundling the bank rather than persuading everyone to become a bank customer. The FinScope 2024 survey carries the underlying data, including the finding that bank savings have declined while other formal and informal savings have grown.

The Bank of Botswana has said electronic payment services and mobile wallets can let unbanked customers store, send and receive money while creating pathways to credit and insurance, and runs a regulatory sandbox testing inclusive payments and interoperability.

South Africa is running a version of this shift, just with different vocabulary. The National Payment System Bill moves regulation from entities to activities, which is precisely the change that lets a non-bank offer what previously required a bank licence. Capitec has taken Bank out of its name. Lesaka and Shoprite are buying into spaza payment terminals.

The Competition Commission found the payment rails have reached township businesses while the selling rails have not, which is the same pattern Botswana shows from the consumer side. The practical point for founders is the measurement one. If you are building for customers with irregular income, counting how many of them have bank accounts tells you almost nothing.

What matters is whether they can receive money, store it, spend it at a merchant and build a transaction record that eventually unlocks credit. That is a product question, and increasingly the answer does not involve a bank.

You might also like our piece on GoTyme calling on banks to drop instant payment fees, Capitec dropping Bank from its name, and how Lesaka reads 90,000 spaza tills.

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