MTN MoMo API Hackathon · South Africa
Daily money for Mzansi.
MTN does not have a distribution problem in South Africa. It has a frequency problem. MoMo Kasi is built around the one question that fixes it: what makes someone open this again tomorrow?
Three money behaviours already happen every day in cash — you earn, you share, you spend. Digitise all three on one ledger and the wallet stops being a destination and becomes a habit.
MoMo sandbox only. No real money moves, and the assistant cannot move money at all — it can only propose, and a human tap settles it.
The loop
Earn it. Share it. Spend it. Then do it again tomorrow.
Earn
Micro-gigs, rank work, a trade. Money that has to arrive the same day it was worked for.
Share
Stokvels, shared bills, black tax. The obligation that makes you open the app on a schedule.
Spend
Taxi fare twice a day, electricity, school fees, airtime. Currently almost all of it cash.
A conventional wallet gets one to four touches a month. This loop is about sixteen a week, because other people are counting on you for most of them.
Why now
Two facts, one product sitting between them.
- youth unemployment
- 47.4%
- minibus taxi industry, a year
- R90-100bn
- stokvel members
- 11 million
- monthly active MoMo users
- 70 million
Ages 15-34, Stats SA QLFS Q2 2026. Roughly 5 million people.
70-75% of daily commutes. Effectively all of it cash.
About 800 000 groups, one in five adults, R50bn+ in cash and paper books.
Across 14 markets. 13bn+ transactions in H1 2026 alone.
Two of every five young South Africans in the labour force cannot find work, while a R90bn transport industry and 800 000 savings groups run on cash that nobody can see. MoMo Kasi sits in the middle of those two facts.
“We started by giving customers access to financial services. Now we want to move from access to active participation.”
We are building the thing the CEO described, one day after he described it.
The product
Five modules. One wallet, one ledger.
Kasi Ride
Collections + DisbursementsTap-to-pay taxi fare that splits 60/25/10/5 at the moment of collection — owner, driver float, fuel pool, insurance pool.
Kasi Gigs
Collections + DisbursementsMicro-work with the money escrowed before the job starts, released on photo proof, and a Trust Score that grows with every clean job.
Kasi Stokvel
Collections + DisbursementsThe group pool MaDlamini keeps in a handbag, with automated collection, a balance every member can see, and a rotating payout.
Kasi Bills
CollectionsPrepaid electricity, school fees, airtime and data — plus split-a-bill, so a shared cost stops being an argument.
Kasi Home
RemittancesA purpose-locked sub-wallet funded from the diaspora. R2 000 sent from London can pay school fees and nothing else.
These are not five apps. A fare paid in Kasi Ride is spendable in Kasi Bills the same second, because both are postings against the same account.
Who it is for
Three people, not a segment.
Nomsa, 24
Katlehong. Matric, no formal job, washes taxis at the rank on good days.
To be paid the day she works, without arguing, with proof she did it.
Thabo, 41
Taxi owner, three vehicles. Buys tyres from a mashonisa at 30% a month.
To see his revenue without standing at the rank, and to borrow at a sane rate.
MaDlamini, 52
Soweto. Runs a 12-member grocery stokvel, R300 a week each, in a book.
To stop carrying R3 600 in a handbag and chasing three people every week.
Engineering
The parts a judge on the panel will look for.
- A double-entry ledger. Not a balance column — every cent traces to a journal that sums to zero.
- Integer basis-point splits with explicit remainder handling. No floating-point money anywhere.
- Idempotency by construction: our UUID is the MoMo X-Reference-Id, so a retry cannot double-pay.
- Two independent paths to truth — the webhook callback and a reconciliation poller, both replay-safe.
- Property-based tests on the money invariants. Splits always sum. Ledgers always balance.
- Offline-first fare capture, demonstrated live in airplane mode.
What if your AI hallucinates a payment?
It cannot. The agent only ever proposes. The proposal is server-signed and expires in 120 seconds, the confirmation card renders from that signature rather than from anything the model said, and a human thumb is the only thing in the system that moves money. No auto-confirm, no voice confirm, at any amount.
