Leveraging Africa's mobile money revolution, a team of loyalty veterans is rewriting the rules of customer engagement for a billion-person, mobile-first market.
When loyalty industry veterans Andrew McBarnett and Leandro Torres focused on Ghana to launch Points Africa, they were not chasing a trend. They were acting on a conviction shaped by decades of experience at programs including Aeroplan, Airmiles, Dotz, Porter Airlines, and Points.com. A core team with deep loyalty/digital/banking experience was pulled together to support the conviction that Africa is the new frontier for Loyalty - Don Cochrane, CMO (founding team member of Airmiles), Adam Meghji, COO (Points.com), Strive Mazunga, CTO (Aeroplan, Scotia Bank)
The shared belief was that Sub-Saharan Africa represented the most compelling untapped opportunity in global loyalty marketing, and that the window to build a ubiquitous, cross-border coalition program was open right now.
That conviction, it turns out, is well-founded. The program launched in Ghana during 2025 and is expanding quickly across the African continent.
The African Loyalty Gap — and Why It Matters
Coalition loyalty programs were pioneered in markets including Canada, UK and Brazil, but in sub-Saharan Africa, they were conspicuously absent. Structural challenges to multi-merchant (another name for coalitions) were abundant. Traditional loyalty models in the West are anchored to credit cards and banking relationships that simply are not the dominant transaction vehicle across much of the continent. Points Africa identified this gap not as a problem, but as an opening.
"We started Points Africa five years ago with a simple belief — that every African deserves to be rewarded for their loyalty in a way that is easy, meaningful, and mobile-first," McBarnett explained. Too many programs, he argued, were built for banking or travel alone, with complicated mechanics and reward thresholds so high that members rarely experienced sufficient tangible value.
What makes Africa different — and distinctly promising — is that consumers have already leapfrogged the traditional banking infrastructure. Rather than building loyalty on top of credit cards, Points Africa is building it on top of mobile money.
Mobile Money as the Foundation for Loyalty
The scale of Africa's mobile payment infrastructure is staggering by any measure. In Kenya, M-Pesa processes approximately $295 billion in annual transactions. In West Africa, MTN's MoMo platform is estimated to generate close to $200 billion in transactional revenue. Across the region, mobile money penetration reaches roughly 70% of the population — a foundation that most Western markets, still anchored to card rails, cannot match.
"The market is far ahead of the West," McBarnett noted, describing a consumer economy that has moved away from cash and bypassed traditional banking entirely. For loyalty marketers, this is a pivotal insight: if you want to reach African consumers where they transact, the mobile wallet is the only address that matters.
Torres framed it as a structural advantage for the loyalty model Points Africa is building. "We are essentially the modern loyalty business because we are tied to a digital wallet in a way that other coalitions have not been able to achieve," he said. The direct integration with payment systems allows Points Africa to onboard partners — including small-to-medium businesses — faster and more efficiently than any card-linked model could.
The program is currently embedded within the MTN MoMo app, which serves 17 million monthly active users in Ghana. Members can view offers, earn points, and redeem rewards without ever leaving the payment interface they already use daily — a frictionless integration that is central to the program's value proposition.
Points Africa Today: Ground Zero in Ghana
Ghana serves as the launch market — what McBarnett calls "ground zero" — for the Points Africa program. The coalition has been structured around the categories where everyday consumer spending is heaviest: fuel, grocery, online shopping, ride-share, food delivery, insurance, and banking.
Anchor partners currently in onboarding or live include StarOil (a leading retail fuel brand), Melcom (a top grocery chain), Jumia (online shopping), Glyco (insurance), a major banking partner, and a globally recognized ride-share platform.
The program's currency model is designed to deliver genuine value: members earn between 3% and 5% back on their spending across the coalition. Torres noted that in the African economic context, this level of reward can represent 10% to 20% of a member's monthly income — a materially significant benefit that elevates customer loyalty from a marketing tactic to a meaningful financial incentive.
The company is targeting to enroll 2 million members in Ghana by the end of this year, with all tier-one anchor partners expected to be fully live in the market by the end of the year.
A Billion-Person Market with an Average Age of 19
Loyalty practitioners accustomed to North American or European market dynamics may be astounded by the demographic profile of Africa. The continent's population of 1.1 to 1.3 billion has a median age of approximately 19 years old. This is a market where the primary consumer is a digital native who has never known a world without a smartphone.
Points Africa is built from the ground up for this demographic. The program is digital-first by design, with no physical card infrastructure, no paper-based mechanics, and no legacy systems to manage. The platform itself — including the mobile app — was built entirely in-house by a technology team of approximately 35 engineers based in Ghana, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe.
McBarnett also sees an emerging travel opportunity. As intra-African travel increases over the next decade — a trajectory he compares to the unification of travel loyalty across Asia — the cross-border dimension of Points Africa's currency becomes increasingly strategic. The vision is to build a single rewards currency that consumers can utilize in Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, the Ivory Coast, and beyond.
Global Expertise, African Roots
The Points Africa team brings a rare combination of global loyalty credentials and personal commitment to the African market.
- McBarnett - born in Trinidad, educated in the UK, and a long-time resident of Canada - spent over 12 years working in loyalty at Aeroplan and Points.com before relocating to Ghana.
- Torres has 15 years in loyalty through his experience working with Dotz in Brazil, during which time he launched retailers across multiple regions and helped build membership to over 50 million members. He joined Points Africa upon seeing the intersection of a generational opportunity in Africa led by a team with globally recognized credentials.
The company has assembled an advisory board that reads like a who's-who of global coalition loyalty plus a mix of African expertise in banking and payments:
- Roberto Chade, founder of Dotz in Brazil
- Brian Sinclair, founder of Nectar in the UK
- Bob McDonald, President of Bond Brand Loyalty in Canada
- Matthew Seagram of Scene+ in Canada
- Luq Balogun, UBA bank group in Africa
- Lizanne D’Souza, Visa EMEA and Flutterwave in Africa
This network of coalition loyalty founders gives Points Africa a deep well of institutional knowledge as it navigates the complexities of building a multi-partner program from scratch.
Expansion Roadmap and Investor Confidence
Points Africa closed its first funding round in December 2024 with Vested World, an Africa-focused venture capital firm, signaling early investor confidence in the model. The company's 18-to-24-month roadmap calls for expansion into Nigeria first, followed by East Africa — Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda — and additional West African markets including Ivory Coast and Benin. South Africa is on the longer-term horizon.
The partnership strategy has been methodical. McBarnett described a simultaneous approach to anchor categories — grocery, fuel, mobile money, banking — working to build partner trust before asking for commitment. Securing MTN MoMo as a payment partner ticked the box on a central strategic goal and marked a significant milestone.
The Bigger Picture for Loyalty Marketers
Points Africa is a case study illustrating a vision for the future of loyalty marketing. The combination of a large, young, digitally connected population, an advanced mobile payment infrastructure, a demonstrable gap in coalition loyalty supply, and a founding team with direct experience running some of the world's best-known programs create a genuinely differentiated market entry. This set of circumstances also demanded a new loyalty model – and it is one that Western marketers can learn from.
For loyalty professionals watching the global landscape, the African market deserves close attention. The infrastructure is in place. The demographic tailwinds are exceptional. And a team with the right credentials is setting the pace.
The experiment is underway — and the early indicators suggest it will be worth following.