MVNO Markets in LATAM & Africa: Trends, Opportunities and Strategy

Latin America (LATAM) and Africa are moving from being “experimental MVNO” regions to becoming strategically important growth markets for mobile virtual network operators and the MVNE platforms that enable them. For telecom executives, this shift changes the core question from “Is an MVNO viable here?” to “How fast can we enter — and on what digital foundation?” 

This transition is not the result of a single catalyst. Rather, it reflects the combined impact of mobile-first consumer behavior, rapidly expanding digital commerce, the rise of fintech and mobile money, and a sustained policy focus on digital inclusion. In many parts of LATAM and Africa, connectivity has moved beyond being a standalone service. It now sits at the center of broader digital ecosystems that combine payments, commerce, content, and enterprise services.

At the same time, MVNOs themselves are evolving. The new wave of virtual operators is less about rebranding wholesale airtime and more about building fully fledged digital businesses — with differentiated distribution models, distinct customer experiences, and clear monetization strategies. In this environment, BSS/OSS is no longer a background IT concern. It has become a primary enabler of speed, regulatory compliance, partner integration, and sustainable unit economics.

Why Emerging Markets Are Becoming MVNO Growth Engines

Compared with Europe, where MVNO models matured over decades, many LATAM and African markets are still in the early stages of wholesale and virtual operator development. That relative immaturity is precisely what creates opportunity. There are fewer entrenched legacy structures, fewer inherited business assumptions, and more underserved segments where new propositions can gain traction.

Two structural signals are particularly important.

First, market formation is accelerating. Industry data and regulatory disclosures consistently show a sharp increase in MVNO launches across Latin America over the past decade. This is not a series of isolated experiments, but a clear indication that wholesale access and virtual operator models are becoming part of the mainstream telecom landscape.

Second, digital ecosystems in these regions are increasingly mobile-native. In LATAM especially, smartphones have become the primary interface for commerce, communication, and financial services. This reinforces the logic of bundling connectivity with payments, subscriptions, and digital services rather than selling it as a standalone product.

What makes emerging markets especially attractive for MVNOs is the combination of demand-side segmentation and supply-side openness.

Untapped Niches with Clear Monetization Logic

The most compelling MVNO opportunities in LATAM and Africa are rarely about offering a cheaper SIM card to the mass market. They are targeted propositions where trust, distribution reach, and service packaging matter more than headline price.

Several segments stand out:

• Youth and digital-native users, attracted by content bundles, short-validity plans, and micro-subscriptions

• Migrants and cross-border communities, with strong demand for international voice, roaming optimization, and remittance-related services

• SMEs and informal businesses, seeking simple connectivity combined with payments, POS solutions, or device financing

• Fintech-led segments, built on KYC-verified user bases and embedded payment flows

• Enterprise and IoT use cases, requiring managed connectivity, policy control, analytics, and SLA-backed services

Each of these segments brings a different operational profile and economic logic. As a result, they impose very different requirements on the underlying platform.

Regulatory Openness Is Improving — Unevenly, but Meaningfully

Across Africa, regulators have begun to formalize MVNO frameworks with the explicit goal of encouraging competition and service innovation. Nigeria is often cited as a reference point, with a licensing structure that clearly defines MVNO tiers, responsibilities, and scope.

Latin America remains more fragmented. Regulatory approaches vary widely from country to country, reflecting different market histories and policy priorities. Even so, the overall direction is broadly supportive of digital competition, particularly where financial inclusion and affordable access align with national objectives.

For operators, the decisive factor is not regulatory uniformity but regulatory predictability. Clear rules around licensing, numbering, taxation, and compliance materially reduce uncertainty and make serious market entry viable.

Lower Legacy Constraints as a Strategic Advantage

New entrants in emerging markets often benefit from the absence of deeply entrenched legacy systems. Without decades of integration debt, they are more willing to adopt cloud-native platforms and standardized APIs from the outset.

That flexibility has tangible consequences. It shortens time-to-market, improves operational resilience, and makes it easier to evolve the business model as demand shifts and new segments emerge.

Market Outlook: From Opportunistic to Scalable MVNOs

LATAM and Africa are moving from opportunistic MVNO launches toward more structured and scalable virtual operator ecosystems.

Growth is increasingly driven by ecosystem-led propositions rather than pure price competition, by non-telco brands using connectivity to deepen customer relationships, and by enterprises embedding mobile connectivity directly into operational workflows.

At the same time, execution risk remains high. Market demand alone is not enough. Platform readiness increasingly determines which operators can scale beyond an initial launch.

MVNO Business Models in Practice

In practice, MVNO models are combinations of three core elements: distribution advantage, service differentiation, and monetization mechanics.

Four patterns dominate across LATAM and Africa:

Across all of them, platform choice directly affects margin sustainability.

The Role of MVNEs in Accelerating Market Entry

In emerging markets, MVNEs are more than outsourced BSS providers. They act as risk mitigators, timeline compressors, and capability multipliers.

By providing pre-integrated charging, provisioning, compliance, and operational tooling, MVNE platforms allow MVNOs to focus on proposition design and go-to-market execution rather than full-stack telecom engineering.

The difference is often measured in quarters. MVNE-enabled launches can be executed in months, while fully in-house stacks typically take much longer to reach production stability.

Technology as a Differentiator — and an Economic Lever

Many MVNO propositions begin with a simple offering. The risk is that simplicity at launch turns into fragility at scale.

Legacy BSS environments struggle where it matters most in emerging markets: product agility, real-time monetization, partner onboarding, and cost automation.

This becomes especially visible in unit economics.

For enterprise and IoT-focused MVNOs, profitability depends less on subscriber volume and more on operational efficiency per customer or contract. Every manual step — onboarding, provisioning, reconciliation, support — directly erodes margin.

Platforms influence unit economics in three ways: reducing cost-to-serve through automation, protecting revenue through real-time charging and policy control, and enabling growth without proportional increases in operational overhead. Where systems rely on manual processes, margins collapse as soon as scale increases.

Standards as a Trust Anchor

Modern MVNO platforms increasingly align with established telecom standards rather than proprietary architectures.

TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture (ODA) provides a reference model for modular, cloud-native BSS/OSS design. Combined with TM Forum Open APIs and REST-based integration, it enables cleaner system boundaries, faster partner onboarding, and lower long-term integration risk.

At the charging layer, Online Charging Systems (OCS) remain central — particularly for prepaid, hybrid, and enterprise use cases. The key difference is that modern OCS implementations are API-driven, tightly coupled to dynamic product catalogs, and built for event-based rather than batch processing.

For CTOs and CIOs, standards alignment is not theoretical compliance. It is a practical mechanism for reducing vendor lock-in and future-proofing the MVNO stack.

Real-World Signals from the Market

Several operators illustrate how this plays out in practice.

The Retail Powerhouse: Bait (Walmart Mexico)

The Play: Walmart Mexico launched Bait, leveraging the wholesale network Altán Redes. By the end of 2024, it became the largest MVNO in the country, boasting over 13 million subscribers.

• The Secret Sauce: Seamless integration with retail. Customers receive data rewards for purchasing groceries.

• The BSS Requirement: A high-performance Real-time Charging System (OCS) capable of handling millions of micro-transactions triggered by retail POS systems.

The Fintech Disruptor: Nu Celular (Nubank, Brazil)

The Play: Nubank, the world’s largest digital bank outside Asia, launched its own MVNO to deepen its ecosystem "stickiness."

• The Secret Sauce: Using telecom data to refine credit scoring and offering integrated management through the banking app.

• The BSS Requirement: Deep API-First integration between the BSS and Core Banking systems, ensuring that identity verification (KYC) and payments are a single, unified flow.

The Ecosystem Pioneer: Equitel (Equity Bank, Kenya)

The Play: Equity Bank didn’t just want to provide mobile banking; they wanted to be the SIM card to control the security and user experience.

• The Secret Sauce: They utilized "Thin SIM" technology to sit on top of existing MNO cards, allowing users to switch between banking and standard mobile services.

• The BSS Requirement: Sophisticated Multi-tenant and Multi-IMSI management capabilities to handle complex routing and security protocols.

The Value Architect: Capitec Connect (South Africa)

The Play: One of South Africa’s leading banks entered the MVNO space with a radical proposition: data that never expires.

• The Secret Sauce: Disrupting the market through radical simplicity and transparent pricing, directly addressing consumer pain points regarding "vanishing" data bundles.

• The BSS Requirement: An ultra-flexible Product Catalog that allows for non-traditional rating logic (no expiry) without requiring months of custom coding.

Expert Perspective

Across MVNO launches in emerging markets, one conclusion keeps resurfacing. Market demand is rarely the constraint. Segments are underserved, and regulatory openness is improving.

What separates success from failure is execution discipline — and the quality of the digital foundation supporting it. MVNOs that treat BSS and operational tooling as strategic assets adapt faster, control margins more effectively, and integrate partners with less friction. Those that compromise early often hit a growth ceiling after the first expansion phase.

In emerging markets, the cost of re-platforming is almost always higher than the cost of doing it right from the start.

Conclusion

Latin America and Africa are becoming strategic MVNO regions as digital economies scale, customer segments remain underserved, and regulatory frameworks mature. The operators that succeed will be those that combine speed with discipline — launching quickly, learning fast, and scaling on platforms designed for partners, payments, compliance, and multi-segment monetization.

MVNO success today is less about spectrum access and more about the digital foundation behind the business. In emerging markets especially, the choice of BSS or MVNE platform is not an IT detail. It is a strategic decision.