Scaling What Matters: Trusted Infrastructure, Shared Innovation and Inclusion for Every Ugandan

Every tap, transfer and digital transaction depends on technology working behind the scenes. While customers experience financial services through mobile applications, USSD menus and transaction notifications, the systems that make these services possible rely on complex infrastructure, security capabilities and partnerships.

For Albert Gitta, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at MTN MoMo, the future of Uganda’s fintech ecosystem will depend on strengthening these foundations.

With more than 18 years of leadership experience across telecommunications, fintech, shared services, technology governance and digital transformation in Africa, Gitta brings a technology and infrastructure perspective to the evolving digital financial services landscape.

Speaking at the 8th FITSPA Annual Fintech Conference (#FAFC2026), he reflected on how far Uganda has come, from predominantly cash-based transactions to a reality where a market trader can receive payments, pay suppliers and settle school fees using a mobile phone.

However, he argued that the next challenge is not simply increasing transaction volumes or expanding access. It is converting innovation into trusted scale by building systems that are reliable, secure and inclusive.

He anchored his address around three priorities: trust, resilience and partnership.

Trust: The Foundation of Digital Finance

For Gitta, trust is the first product in financial services. Customers entrust digital platforms with their money, personal information and increasingly important aspects of their economic lives. That confidence must be earned and protected through reliable infrastructure, strong security, transparency and effective consumer protection.

“Trust is the first product. It takes years to build but only moments to damage,” he emphasised.

He pointed to a 6.6% decline in active internet banking users in Uganda during the 2024/25 period, arguing that customer disengagement can happen quietly when confidence in financial services is weakened.

“Nobody forced these customers to leave,” he observed.

His point was that the industry must look beyond the number of people accessing financial services and pay closer attention to whether they continue using them with confidence.

This calls for a shift towards measuring financial health and meaningful financial inclusion, rather than focusing exclusively on account numbers, subscriptions and transaction volumes.

Consumer education, fraud prevention and strong agent networks also remain critical to sustaining trust, particularly as digital financial services reach more people and communities.

Resilience: Keeping Everyday Payments Moving

The second priority was resilience. Digital transactions may appear simple to customers, but they depend on an interconnected system of telecommunications networks, payment platforms, banks, fintechs, identity systems, agents and cybersecurity infrastructure.

When these systems fail, the consequences extend beyond technology.

A failed transaction can prevent someone from buying medicine, paying school fees or completing a business payment. For merchants and small businesses, service interruptions can affect sales, cash flow and their ability to serve customers.

Gitta therefore challenged the industry to recognise the responsibility that comes with operating critical financial infrastructure. Reliability must be built into the systems that support digital finance, ensuring that services remain available and dependable as transaction volumes grow.

As he put it, “A payment is not a technology KPI. It is a promise to the economy.”

The statement captures the wider economic responsibility of digital payment providers. Their role goes beyond processing transactions to ensuring that individuals and businesses can depend on the services they use every day.

Partnership: Building a Connected Financial Ecosystem

Gitta identified partnership as the third pillar of sustainable digital growth, arguing that no single institution can build Uganda’s digital economy alone.

“The future of fintech will not be built by one bank, one fintech, one telecom operator, one technology company, or one regulator. It will be built together."

One area where this collaboration is particularly important is fraud prevention. Criminals often exploit gaps between financial service providers and telecommunications networks. A fraudster identified and blocked on one network should not simply move to another and continue operating.

Gitta pointed to the Anti-Fraud Consortium as an important step towards stronger industry-wide cooperation through shared intelligence and coordinated responses.

Greater collaboration must also extend to interoperability, allowing customers and merchants to transact more conveniently across different payment platforms.

MTN MoMo's Commitments to the Next Phase of Growth

Beyond identifying the challenges, Gitta outlined three commitments through which MTN MoMo intends to contribute to the next phase of Uganda's digital payments development.

First, MTN MoMo committed to investing millions of dollars in the coming year to strengthen capacity and reliability. This investment is intended to support the infrastructure required to handle growing transaction volumes and deliver more dependable services.

Second, the company plans to transition from its current Open API offering to a new platform known as One API. The approach is intended to simplify integration and encourage fintechs and other partners to bring forward customer problems that technology can solve.

As Gitta put it, “Bring us the customer problem, not only the product.”

Third, MTN MoMo committed to advancing merchant interoperability, with the ambition of enabling customers to pay any merchant through a single code. This would simplify digital payment acceptance and improve convenience for both merchants and customers.

These commitments signal an intention to move beyond isolated payment solutions towards a more connected ecosystem, where shared infrastructure and innovation can support broader participation.

Inclusion: Measuring What Matters

Gitta also challenged fintech founders and industry players to keep solving real customer problems while designing solutions that can scale.

For him, the true measure of financial inclusion is not simply how many people have accounts or how many transactions are processed. It is whether digital financial services make everyday life easier, create economic opportunities and enable more Ugandans to participate meaningfully in the economy.

He called on fintechs to design for security from the beginning, banks to make the movement of value cheaper, government to continue digitising public services, and regulators to protect consumers while creating room for innovation.

These priorities are interconnected. Trust encourages adoption, resilience sustains usage, and partnership makes it possible to extend the benefits of digital finance across the ecosystem.

Significance: From Digital Growth to Trusted Scale

Uganda's fintech ecosystem has recorded considerable growth. Electronic money transactions increased by 28% in 2025, while the country had approximately 37 million active mobile money subscriptions in the second quarter of 2026. MTN MoMo alone serves approximately 15 million customers active over a 90-day period and operates a network of more than 200,000 agents.

These figures demonstrate the growing role of digital financial services in everyday economic activity. However, the next measure of progress must go beyond adoption and transaction volumes.

MTN MoMo's commitments to infrastructure investment, a unified API and merchant interoperability point to opportunities for a more connected payments ecosystem. In particular, merchant interoperability could reduce fragmentation in payment acceptance and make digital transactions more convenient for customers and businesses.

Albert Gitta's message at #FAFC2026 was ultimately a call for the industry to focus on what matters most: building trusted infrastructure, strengthening resilience and working together to make financial services more accessible and dependable.

Because behind every tap, transfer and digital transaction is a customer placing trust in a system. And sustaining that trust is what will allow Uganda's digital financial ecosystem to scale.