In the Democratic Republic of Congo, mobile money is no longer an alternative payment method. It is the payment method.

The sector generated 647.91 million dollars in revenue according to the ARPTC report for the fourth quarter of 2025, up 4.3% (ARPTC via Bankable). So for a merchant the question is no longer “should I accept mobile money?” but “which one, and how do I avoid losing money on it?”.

Three operators, no winner

This is the Congolese peculiarity, and it makes merchants’ lives harder: unlike Kenya where M-Pesa crushes the market, DR Congo is a three-way market where nobody dominates enough to let you ignore the others.

The 2025 numbers show it plainly:

  • M-Pesa (Vodacom) stays first with 207.1 million dollars in revenue in 2025, up 23%. But its transaction share slips from 46% to 43.4%.
  • Airtel Money is growing much faster: 194.8 million dollars, up 42% year on year, with share climbing from 37.5% to 40.8%.
  • Orange Money posts the market’s strongest growth, with its active customer base up 50.4%, to 7.7 million.

The gap between the top two narrowed to 12.2 million dollars, from 31.3 million a year earlier (Bankable, Ouragan).

The practical conclusion is simple: accept all three. A customer will not switch operator for you. They will go to the shop next door.

Interoperability does not solve your problem

You may be told interoperability makes all this moot, since an Airtel customer can now send money to an M-Pesa account.

That is true, and it is good news for individuals. But on the merchant side it changes almost nothing.

Fees and delays vary depending on the direction of the transfer, and above all you are still left with several separate statements to match. Interoperability shifts the complexity onto the customer. It does not remove it from your counter.

The real cost is reconciliation

Accepting mobile money is easy. What comes after is not.

The classic scenario: the customer pays, the merchant gets the confirmation SMS, glances at the amount, and rings the sale up as “cash” or “other”. By evening the register says one thing and the operator statement says another.

With one operator, that is already a discrepancy to explain. With three, it is three statements to match by hand, every week, with no common reference. That is where the time and the money go.

Three problems come back consistently:

  • Phantom payments. A customer shows a fake confirmation SMS and leaves with the goods. The fraud is simple and widespread.
  • Amount errors. A zero too many or too few slips through in the rush.
  • No way to match records. Without a transaction reference on the receipt, tying a statement line to a specific sale becomes archaeology.

All three share one cause: the payment and the sale live in two separate systems. We break down that mechanism and how to fix it in our M-Pesa guide for merchants.

What to demand from your POS

The right criterion is not “does this register handle mobile money?” but “does it handle the three operators in my market, and does it spare me the re-keying?”.

In concrete terms:

  1. The register initiates the payment, rather than waiting for an SMS you have to interpret.
  2. The transaction reference is stored on the sale and printed on the receipt.
  3. Reports break revenue down by operator, so you see each one’s real share of your business.
  4. The system works offline, because Congolese network coverage remains irregular.
  5. Merchant fees are known and priced into your margin, never passed on to the customer.

That last point deserves a word. Charging a surcharge to customers who pay by mobile money is commercially poor and sometimes against the service terms. You penalise the payment method your customers prefer.

Offline is not optional here

A register that demands a permanent connection is unusable across much of the country.

Power cuts, irregular mobile coverage, wifi that drops: in that context offline mode is not insurance, it is the normal operating mode. We explain the three levels of “offline” — and why two of them are useless — in our article on offline POS software.

Our approach

That is exactly what digabloPos was built for, with an office in Kinshasa and direct knowledge of the Congolese market:

  • M-Pesa, Orange Money and Airtel Money straight from the counter, with no re-keying.
  • Transaction reference attached to the sale, so reconciliation takes care of itself.
  • Reports by operator, so you steer on real numbers.
  • Full offline mode, with automatic sync when the network returns.
  • Free, with no mandatory subscription, inventory included.

Want to connect all three operators to your register? Let’s talk about your project.

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