Mukuru, the cross-border money transfer and fintech platform, has set itself a target that will test its expansion model across the region: doubling its customer base in Southern Africa within three to five years. Chief executive Andy Jury outlined the plan in an interview with Business Day, framing the company’s growth strategy around the gap between formal financial institutions and the millions of people who earn, spend and trade outside them.
The scale of that gap is documented in FinMark Trust’s FinScope consumer South Africa survey, which found that 9.5-million people earned an income through informal work in 2025, up from 8-million a year earlier. The survey also recorded that 89% of South African adults had bank accounts in 2025, equivalent to 40.8-million people. Yet about 13-million used those accounts mainly to receive money and withdraw it immediately. Access to banking, in other words, has not translated into the use of financial services for saving, payments and other needs. It is this shortfall that Mukuru’s strategy is built to address.
Jury, whose company has served 17-million customers over the past two decades, described Southern Africa as the heartland of its ecosystem and said he would like that number to double within three to five years. The expansion will build on the established remittance business while broadening the offering to include digital wallets and other financial services for customers operating across formal and informal markets.
The company’s method, as Jury described it, is sequential: establish a relationship with a customer by meeting immediate needs, such as sending money home affordably or storing money digitally, before introducing additional products. “Financial inclusion is a buzzword that people use as a throwaway comment. It’s really at the core of what we do,” he said.
Data sits at the centre of the model. Because customers transact through Mukuru, the platform generates a digital record of their activity, which the company can use to assess creditworthiness. “If you use Mukuru, you get a digital record of your transactions, which we can use to make a credit lending decision against and give you some credit,” Jury said. This offers a route to borrowing for customers whose circumstances make conventional channels difficult to access, and it gives the company a way to manage lending risk among people with limited financial histories. New customers initially face restrictions on the services available to them, with access widened as transaction behaviour and additional information allow risk to be assessed.
Meanwhile, the distribution network is designed to accommodate the fluidity between formal and informal economies, letting customers move between physical cash and digital transactions. Digital wallets can serve workers receiving income as well as entrepreneurs buying and selling goods in the informal economy. Jury said the approach is intended to build longer-term relationships rather than treat each remittance or payment as an isolated transaction, with greater platform use expanding the network and improving operating efficiency.
The backdrop to this expansion is one of financial strain. FinScope found that the proportion of South Africans actively saving fell to 40% in 2025 from 47% in 2024, while almost half were not saving at all, a signal of how immediate expenses are crowding out efforts to build financial resilience.
Mukuru’s regional footprint also ties its performance to political and economic developments affecting migration and cross-border trade. Jury said tensions around migration in South Africa had affected remittance activity, though the company could not isolate the precise impact. Transfers sent from South Africa had declined somewhat, while remittances from elsewhere in Africa had increased as family members supported people whose ability to earn an income in South Africa had been affected. The flows remain resilient, he said, because the money is often used for essentials such as food, school fees and medical payments. “We recognise the resilience of our customer base,” he said.
Whether a doubling of customers in three to five years is achievable will depend in part on conditions the company itself cannot control, from migration politics to household budgets already stretched thin.