2020 in Review — The Magic behind Mama Money’s best year yet.

Mama Money
3 min readDec 23, 2020
A picture from Mama’s 2019 celebration, before the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Mama’s dream to make money transfers easy, safe, fast, and affordable so that more money arrives home for those that need it most has become a reality. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you to all of Mama’s amazing customers for trusting us to get your hard-earned money home safely.

It has been a tough year for everyone navigating through the Covid-19 storm. This immense challenge brought with it great new opportunities for change and innovation, as it would no longer be ‘business-as-usual’ going forward.

At Mama’s headquarters in Cape Town, we were blown away by the resilience of the communities we serve as we saw more new customers joining our family than ever before.

We had to expand rapidly to keep up with this growth, and while the pandemic made this difficult, we now have almost 200 permanent team members with thousands of field agents across the country who are the driving force behind Mama’s success.

Mama’s fast-growing family

Customer experience continues to be our number one priority, this team grew the most over 2020 and will keep doing so into the new year and beyond.

We’ve also expanded our product, tech, and finance teams over the year and there are still plenty of opportunities to join Mama’s family for ambitious people who care about making a positive impact in the world. Be sure to follow Mama Money on LinkedIn to be the first to know when new opportunities arise.

Promising partnerships

Mama’s rapid success is based on working closely with our amazing partners in South Africa and around the world.

Most notably, Mama Money partnered with Western Union as we gear up for further global expansion. This partnership allows for Mama Money customers to send money to their loved ones with Mama’s low-cost and Western Union’s reliable payout network worldwide.

We have fantastic new partners coming soon, we can’t reveal it just yet but watch this space in 2021.

Mama’s Mission

Too many people are still paying exorbitant fees and are using informal, unreliable channels for an essential service. Mama Money is actively changing this.

The world went into lockdown, and Mama Money’s app and digital service offered the ideal means for people to continue to support their families back home through these trying times.

For us, it’s very important that we grow responsibly. Our business was not founded to make massive profits at the expense of our customers. Mama Money’s sustainable and consistent growth shows that we are here for the long term, and we feel like we’re just getting started.

We have exciting new products and partnerships in development that will come to fruition next year, and we will continue to reach new heights as we expand into new territories around the world to help people send more money home.

A word from Mathieu Coquillon, co-founder of Mama Money

“How to summarize this unprecedented year? It’s difficult right now as we’re all still processing and dealing with all that has happened. Only with time will we be able to truly reflect on the challenges we have had to overcome together.

Social scientists will have us believe that the nature of humans leans towards selfishness, violence, and combativeness. If this is true you would think that a global pandemic would rip through the veneer of social cohesion and unmask our true cynical nature.

But what actually happened?

Yes, there was panic early on, but that didn’t last. What we saw was that people were kind, peaceful, helpful and with a deep sense of cooperation, we would get through these dark days together.

As a company, we were thrust overnight into a new remote working reality. Did our team react cynically? Not at all, and while the future remained uncertain, we stayed true to being a business centered on social impact. We came closer together, and in the midst of a pandemic, we had our best and biggest months ever.

Mama’s future is bright and there is so much optimism and positivity we still need to bring to the world.

Thank you all for being superheroes!”

From everyone at team Mama, we wish you a happy and safe festive season and hope you are able to be closer to those you love, both near and far.

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Mama Money

International Money Transfers. Making it easier to send #MoreMoneyHome to your loved ones across Africa, Asia & Europe.