Weaver Fintech’s launch of PayJustNow Mobile marks an important expansion of South Africa’s fintech industry. The company is moving beyond buy-now-pay-later services into mobile connectivity, using a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) model on Cell C’s network.
The service began its phased rollout on August 27, according to MyBroadband. The move gives Weaver another channel through which to engage customers, collect behavioural insights and promote financial products.
The strategy is straightforward but commercially ambitious: make connectivity part of the financial relationship rather than treating it as a separate service.
A Fintech with an Unusually Large Starting Base
PayJustNow is already one of South Africa’s better-known consumer fintech brands. Its core Pay-in-3 product allows customers to divide purchases into three equal instalments, with the first payment made at checkout and the remaining two paid monthly.
Weaver Fintech’s 2025 results show the scale available to the company. The group reported more than 4.3mn fintech customers, while PayJustNow had 3.7mn registered customers. The business processed 9.4mn cumulative transactions through more than 3,450 active merchants and 12,324 points of presence.
Weaver Fintech reported 23 percent revenue growth to R5.5bn in 2025 and said it was adding more than 120,000 fintech sign-ups a month.
That customer base changes the economics of entering telecoms. A conventional new MVNO must spend heavily to acquire customers. Weaver can begin with millions of people who already know its brand and use its financial products.
Mobile Becomes a Customer-Engagement Tool
Weaver’s rationale goes beyond selling airtime and data.
Chief executive Sean Wibberley has described PayJustNow as an entry point into a wider ecosystem of lending, insurance and payments. “It allows us to acquire customers virally at scale and at low cost,” he told MyBroadband.
The company says customer value rises sharply as users adopt more products. According to the figures reported by MyBroadband, a single-product customer generates about R1,176 in annual revenue, compared with more than R10,000 for customers using two products and more than R18,000 for those using five or more.
That makes mobile connectivity strategically useful even if the telecoms business itself produces relatively modest margins.
The more frequently customers interact with PayJustNow, the more opportunities Weaver has to promote insurance, lending and payment products. A mobile account can therefore become a daily engagement layer for a business whose traditional financial products may only be used periodically.
Data is Part of the Proposition
Andre Hugo, Weaver Ventures managing executive, said PayJustNow Mobile was designed to increase engagement across the wider ecosystem.
The company plans to reward positive customer interactions with airtime. In return, it gains additional information about customers’ behaviour.
“Purchase behaviour, repayment behaviour, and connectivity behaviour all enrich the same picture,” Hugo said, according to MyBroadband.
This is potentially more valuable than the mobile subscription itself.
Payment histories can tell a lender how a customer manages credit. Connectivity behaviour can indicate frequency of engagement. Purchase activity can provide information about consumption patterns. Combined, those signals can support more targeted marketing, product recommendations and potentially more sophisticated credit assessment.
But the opportunity comes with a corresponding responsibility. Financial and connectivity data are sensitive commercial assets, and Weaver will need to maintain clear consent, privacy and responsible-use practices as the ecosystem expands.
Cell C has Already Made MVNOs a Growth Engine
PayJustNow is entering telecoms through Cell C rather than building its own network. That is important because MVNOs allow companies with strong customer relationships but no radio network to enter mobile services without the capital burden associated with operating nationwide infrastructure.
Cell C has increasingly positioned wholesale and MVNO partnerships as a core growth strategy. In its latest interim results, the company reported wholesale revenue of R840mn, up 22.5 percent year on year. Its MVNO HLR subscriber base exceeded 5.1mn, while data traffic per MVNO user increased 86 percent year on year.
Cell C’s financial results describe the MVNO ecosystem as a strategic priority and a long-term growth lever.
For Cell C, the arrangement brings additional customers onto its network without requiring the operator to own the consumer relationship. For Weaver, it provides access to national infrastructure without the cost of becoming a full network operator.
The interests are therefore aligned.
Rewards could Determine Whether the Model Works
PayJustNow appears to be using incentives to connect financial behaviour with mobile consumption.
Screenshots cited by MyBroadband indicate that the company is considering 500MB of free WhatsApp data each month for six months. Customers could also earn up to R200 in airtime each month for paying selected funeral insurance premiums, loans or their first BNPL instalment on time.
The economics will depend on whether these rewards generate enough additional customer activity to justify their cost.
Weaver is testing this before making the service broadly available. Hugo told MyBroadband that the first cohort consisted of internal staff, followed by BNPL customers, insurance customers and loan customers.
The company expects wider availability within the following month or two, depending on customer feedback and the results of its unit-economics tests.
That cautious rollout is commercially sensible. It allows Weaver to measure data consumption, retention, reward costs and cross-selling before committing substantial resources.
The African Opportunity is Larger
The strategy arrives as mobile connectivity becomes an increasingly important part of Africa’s digital economy.
According to the GSMA’s Mobile Economy Africa 2026 report, mobile technologies and services contributed $240bn to Africa’s economy in 2025, equivalent to 7.8 percent of GDP. The contribution is forecast to reach $290bn by 2030.
Yet access alone does not guarantee usage. The GSMA estimates that about 63 percent of Africans live within mobile broadband coverage but do not use mobile internet. Affordability, device costs and digital skills remain major barriers.
This creates an opportunity for companies that can bundle connectivity with other services.
A fintech-led MVNO could combine affordable mobile access with payments, credit, insurance, rewards and digital commerce. The model could be particularly attractive in markets where consumers already use mobile phones as their primary gateway to financial services.
The Real Test is not SIM Registrations
PayJustNow Mobile should not be judged simply by how many subscribers it attracts.
The more important measures will be active users, customer retention, average data consumption, reward costs, cross-selling rates and revenue per customer. Weaver must demonstrate that mobile connectivity increases the lifetime value of its existing financial customers rather than simply adding another low-margin business.
That distinction matters.
The company’s competitive advantage is not its ability to sell data. South Africa already has established mobile operators and a growing MVNO market. Its advantage is the financial ecosystem surrounding the mobile service.
If Weaver can successfully connect payments, lending, insurance and mobile connectivity through one customer relationship, PayJustNow Mobile could become a powerful distribution mechanism for financial services.
The broader lesson for African fintech companies is clear. The next stage of competition may not be about building another payments app. It may be about controlling more of the everyday digital relationship with the customer.
PayJustNow has now taken its first step into that contest. The decisive question is whether its mobile service can turn a large fintech customer base into a more valuable, more frequent and more integrated relationship.
