One of the longest-running mobile money platforms, M-Pesa, is celebrating reaching 50m monthly active customers, cementing its position as Africa’s largest fintech platform.
Launched more than 14 years ago in Kenya, M-Pesa is today available in Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Ghana and Egypt. M-Pesa was sold by Vodafone to South African telecoms group Vodacom Group and Kenya’s Safaricom plc in April 2020. Safaricom is 40 per cent owned by Vodafone and 35 per cent by the Kenyan government. Vodacom is 60.5 per cent owned by Vodafone.
The number of active M-Pesa customers has doubled in the past five years. The milestone also comes 18 months after Safaricom and Vodacom launched the M-Pesa Africa joint venture to accelerate growth of the service across the continent. M-Pesa Africa has been delivering digital platforms as part of its focus to be the largest fintech and digital ecosystem across the continent.
M-Pesa became an even more important platform for customers during the pandemic, with transaction volumes increasing 44 per cent year-on-year in the first quarter of the current financial year. The number of transactions grew to 4.5 billion in the quarter, with a total transaction value of €63bn (£54.2bn).
“14 years ago, we launched M-Pesa to connect our customers to each other and to different opportunities,” said Sitoyo Lopokoiyit, Managing Director, M-Pesa Africa. “We are delighted to celebrate this remarkable milestone with our more than 50m customers across the continent. As an honour to this achievement, we are reiterating our commitment and deepening our focus on more innovations that will further transform the lives of our customers,”
In 2007, Safaricom and Vodafone launched M-Pesa in Kenya as a way for customers to instantly send money to each other. For many customers, the service became their first and often only access to financial services propelling its fast growth and adoption across the country.
Consequently, the service has largely contributed to the growth of formal financial inclusion across the continent. In Kenya, access to financial services and products has increased by around 56 per cent between 2006-2019 driven by the availability of mobile money. M-Pesa has also been credited with lifting roughly 2 per cent of Kenyan households out of extreme poverty.
Today M-Pesa is a two-sided network that provides a wide variety of financial services to both businesses and individual customers. Customers can send and receive money, make and receive business payments, pay bills, make and […]