Photo credit: Omar Marques/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images Azimo have announced an 80 percent growth in transactions sent to M-Pesa in Kenya since the start of 2018, confirming the dominance of mobile wallets, which accounted for 96 percent of the payments delivered to the wallet.
The fintech has been working with Homesend, the cross-border payments provider and joint venture of Mastercard and eServGlobal, in order to enable instant money transfers to the Kenyan mobile wallet and in turn, strengthening Azimo’s market share among Kenyans abroad.
As per the last census, there are more than 160,000 registered Kenyans living in the UK and they send a combined total of £457 million to their family and friends back home, according to the Pew Research Center .
By March 2018, there were over 20 million monthly active M-Pesa users and 101,000 active merchants that responded to the demand of the service, as reported on Safaricom . Also, Daily Nation reported that it is estimated that mobile money transactions amount to almost 50 percent of Kenya’s GDP.
In addition to this, as Kenya is a pioneer in the mobile payments space, is making a steadfast impact promoting financial inclusion and is setting an example for other countries to follow. Azimo’s CEO Michael Kent said that they are excited to see growth in Kenya and with the mobile wallet.
“M-Pesa in Kenya demonstrates the most successful implementation of a mobile financial services scheme to date and has managed to scale at impressive levels. We continue to contribute to this growth by offering the best possible service to more Kenyans abroad with the cooperation of Homesend.”
Laurent Desnouck, Chief Commercial Officer of Homesend, added: “Cash still represents a barrier to financial inclusion in many developing countries. Its solutions like this that have made it safer and more convenient for the Kenyan diaspora to send money back home.
“We’ll work with partners like Azimo to continue to transform the cross-border transfer landscape.” Azimo has built up a global platform that enables payments in more than 80 currencies to more than 190 receiving countries and the company now reaches more than 5 billion potential customers.
Today, Azimo also announced a strategic partnership with a leading African payments business Interswitch group and this deal will enable instant money transfers from 23 countries in Europe to any customer in Nigeria.
Michael Kent said: "A huge and rapidly growing population coupled with the explosion of smartphone ownership mean that […]
