METIX cuts fees, banks push back, and customers keep paying

Mozambique's Instant Payment System, commercially branded as METIX, completed two months of official existence without its promise of free and immediate bank transfers having effectively reached the majority of Mozambicans. The reason is not technical. It is economic. And the numbers prove it.

Launched on 16 March 2026 by the Governor of the Bank of Mozambique — Mozambique's central bank and primary financial regulator — Rogério Zandamela, METIX was born to eliminate the most visible barrier to financial inclusion: the fees charged on interbank transfers between private individuals. The system is operated and managed by the Interbank Society of Mozambique (SIMO), a clearing and settlement infrastructure jointly owned by the country's commercial banks and overseen by the central bank. It runs around the clock, allowing funds to reach the recipient in under twenty-five seconds, via mobile application, internet banking, or USSD, a basic mobile technology accessible even without a smartphone or internet connection and widely used across rural Mozambique, where the majority of the country's 33 million people live. Notice No. 1/GBM/2026 of 25 February formalises the regime: interbank transactions ordered by natural persons are exempt from fees and commissions, up to a daily limit of 200,000 meticais ($3,125) per account. For legal persons, the daily limit is 500,000 meticais ($7,800).

For the banks, however, the exemption means an immediate, recurring, and quantifiable loss. And it is precisely that loss which explains the systematic reluctance with which commercial banks have treated the very platform their own regulator created.

The official simplified fee schedules of the four largest banks in the country, obtained by TORRE.News, document in unimpeachable terms what is at stake. Before METIX, and in practice still today for anyone unable to access the platform, an over-the-counter interbank transfer cost between 450 and 635 meticais ($7 to $10) per transaction. To appreciate what that means: in a country where the majority of the population lives on under $2 a day, a single bank transfer could consume the equivalent of three to five days of income. Standard Bank charges 635 meticais ($9.93) for the same operation, according to its schedule. FNB sets the over-the-counter interbank transfer at 520 meticais ($8.13). Millennium BIM and BCI charged 450 meticais ($7.03) each. Through digital channels, the amounts fell substantially but remained significant: Millennium BIM charges 100 meticais ($1.56), BCI 120 meticais ($1.88), FNB 100 meticais ($1.56), and Standard Bank 180 meticais ($2.82) per transfer.

The paradox is glaring: Mozambique is consistently ranked among the five poorest countries in the world by per capita income, according to data from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. At the same time, its commercial banks recorded total profits of 30.8 billion meticais ($481 million) in 2023, with a return on equity (ROE) of 19.11 per cent, well above the African average of 16 per cent recorded in the same year, and substantially higher than the average of the major South African banks, which stood between 17 and 18 per cent in an incomparably more developed and competitive market. Even in 2024, a year in which profits fell 21.9 per cent to 24 billion meticais ($375 million), the ROE remained at 13.91 per cent. This is the profitability of scarcity: commissions extracted from a poor population sustain margins that wealthier economies cannot replicate.

According to the Bank of Mozambique's Financial Stability Report, in 2023 approximately 82.6 per cent of the share capital of the fifteen commercial banks operating in Mozambique was of foreign origin. South African capital held around 29.5 per cent of the total, followed by Portuguese capital at 25.3 per cent. The three institutions classified by the Bank of Mozambique as domestically systemically important, the so-called D-SIBs, are entirely controlled by foreign capital: BCI is majority-owned by Caixa Geral de Depósitos and BPI, both Portuguese state-linked institutions; Millennium BIM is 66.69 per cent controlled by BCP África, of the Millennium BCP group, also Portuguese; and Standard Bank Mozambique is 98.15 per cent owned by the South African Standard Bank Group. FNB is a subsidiary of the South African FirstRand group. Absa belongs to its South African namesake banking group. The profits that METIX threatens are not merely revenues of companies based in Mozambique: they are dividends leaving one of the world's poorest countries to flow to shareholders in Lisbon and Johannesburg. In this context, the equation acquires a political dimension that extends far beyond bank transfers.

The concrete form of resistance has been deliberate invisibility. Even in banks that formally integrated METIX into their platforms, the user without advanced digital literacy instinctively reaches for the standard transfer button, which continues to charge commissions. The free transfer exists, but it is hidden. This strategy does not violate the letter of Notice No. 1/GBM/2026, which mandates the exemption of fees but does not specify that METIX must be the default channel presented to customers. The banks exploited precisely this regulatory gap.

The pattern of non-compliance is not new. During the 2024 to 2025 inspection cycle, the Bank of Mozambique imposed fines totalling 70 million meticais ($1.09 million) on nine institutions. BCI was the most heavily penalised, with 31.29 million meticais ($489,000) for five infringements, including expressly the violation of the fee and charges regime and the alteration of product terms and conditions without prior regulatory approval. FNB was fined 13.12 million meticais ($205,000) for the improper collection of commissions. In the previous cycle, BCI again topped the list with a fine of 43 million meticais ($672,000). The bank that the Bank of Mozambique classifies as the domestic systemically important institution with the highest score in the system, 230 points in the 2026 D-SIB index, was the most heavily fined in two consecutive cycles, precisely for violating the rules on commissions. The equation of impunity is structural: a fine of 30 million meticais ($469,000) does not deter non-compliance when it represents less than a week's earnings from transfer commissions. The perverse incentive is mathematically embedded.

The regulator's own data confirms the impact on consumers. In the Statistical Complaints Report for the second half of 2025, the Bank of Mozambique recorded 483 formal complaints out of a universe of 31,646,085 clients, with transfers emerging as the fourth most complained-about matter. BCI accumulated 168 complaints, representing 34.8 per cent of the total. Millennium BIM recorded 84 complaints, 17.4 per cent of the total. The two banks together account for 52.2 per cent of all complaints in the sector. In response, the regulator ordered refunds of 16.3 million meticais ($255,000) in improper charges identified during the period and carried out eight on-site inspection actions.

The regional comparison situates the problem with precision. In South Africa, a country with a per capita income far above Mozambique's, the five largest banks offer free digital transfers for retail customers, with residual fees that rarely exceed 8 meticais ($0.12). The difference is a factor of ten to twenty. The experience that METIX chose not to replicate is that of Brazil's PIX, launched by the Banco Central do Brasil in November 2020. Resolution BCB No. 1/2020 mandated the participation of all financial institutions, with a 90-day compliance deadline and no room for technical constraints as justification. In 2024, PIX recorded 63.51 billion operations and moved more than 26 trillion reais, a growth of 54 per cent over 2023. Mozambique adopted gradualism where Brazil chose compulsion, and the results reflect that choice.

The estimate of losses accumulated through resistance is illuminating. If banks collect between 7 and 10 million meticais ($109,000 to $156,000) per day in commissions on transfers by private individuals, each month of delay in effective integration is equivalent to preserving between 210 and 300 million meticais ($3.3 to $4.7 million) in revenues. Over two months since the launch, the resistance has cost Mozambican bank customers, by this estimate, between 420 and 600 million meticais ($6.6 to $9.4 million) in charges that should have been zero. There is no official estimate in the available public data that contradicts this calculation.

Sources within the central bank describe Governor Zandamela pressing his technical staff to accelerate the process, aware that every week of inertia undermines the narrative of success with which the project was presented. The dissonance is glaring: at the launch ceremony, the banks applauded the initiative. Off camera, the same institutions allege technical constraints and adopt strategies of invisibility that no existing regulation can directly sanction.

Banks that extract dividends from one of the world's poorest countries while resisting a financial inclusion measure approved by their own regulator do not need more dialogue. They need deadlines and consequences.