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Kenya: Mobile money service M-PESA celebrates15 years
M-PESA has marked 15 years since Safaricom and Vodafone launched the service in March 2007. From its beginning in Kenya, M-PESA has grown to more than 51 million customers, 465,000 businesses, 600,000 agents and 42,000 developers across Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Ghana and Egypt. The service processes more than 61 million transactions a day making it Africa’s largest fintech provider.
With more people across the continent shifting to smartphones, 3G and 4G broadband, M-PESA is today evolving to become a digital financial services provider. In 2021, M-PESA Africa launched the M-PESA Super App and an M-PESA Business Super App which enable any business on the service to run a virtual store front providing their services virtually through M-PESA Mini Apps.
“We launched M-PESA back in 2007 in a bid to deepen financial inclusion for our customers by connecting them to useful and affordable financial services. In 15 years, we have seen population access to formal financial services grow to as high as 83% as we introduced additional services and reached more customers. Going into the future, we continue to build on our purpose to transform lives by providing our customers with a wide variety of digital solutions that empower them in an increasingly digital world, ” said Peter Ndegwa, CEO – Safaricom.
As part of the 15 year celebrations, Safaricom will reward 15 customers and 15 businesses every hour for 15 days from March 7th 2022 to March 22nd 2022 for sending money or making payments through the M-PESA Super App and M-PESA Business Super App. The winners will be randomly selected and will get back 15% of the transaction value up to a maximum of KSh. 1,000.
“In the last 15 years, M-PESA has transformed the lives of millions of customers empowering them with useful and affordable financial services. With increasing smartphone usage across the continent, we are transitioning to be a digital financial services provider connecting customers and businesses in a digital world,” said Sitoyo Lopokoiyit, MD – M-PESA Africa.
The M-PESA Super App is designed to be a customer’s lifestyle companion connecting them to services they need in a typical day including shopping, restaurants and food delivery, transport services, government services and much more. More than 9 million customers and 320,000 businesses have downloaded the M-PESA Super App since its launch.
In addition to the Super App, M-PESA Africa is revamping the M-PESA platform to support additional digital services, faster development of new products, and to achieve increased stability and reliability. The platform revamp includes expansion of the M-PESA APIs to provide developers with even deeper access to the service enabling them to deploy more innovations on the service.
