M-Pesa hits the 50-million mark

M-Pesa has reached 50 million monthly active customers, confirming 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.

The number of active M-Pesa customers has doubled in the past five years. The milestone also comes just 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% 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 €63-billion.

“As Africa’s biggest mobile money platform, M-Pesa has been one of the continent’s most astonishing financial services success stories, helping millions of people improve their lives and start businesses through financial inclusion,” says Shameel Joosub, CEO of Vodacom Group. “That said, we are still in the early stages of M-Pesa’s evolution and remain firmly committed to investing significantly into expanding the M-Pesa ecosystem, particularly through our Super App platform, so that we continue to democratise financial services.”

M-Pesa Africa MD Sitoyo Lopokoiyit says: “14 years ago, we launched M-Pesa to connect our customers to each other and to different opportunities. We are delighted to celebrate this remarkable milestone with our more than 50 million 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 send money to each other instantly. For many customers, the service became their first and often only access to financial services propelling its fast growth and adoption across the country. Election violence that plagued Kenya at the time proved to be the catalyst for a massive uptake of the service, as it was the only way for many people to get money to dependants.

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% between 2006-2019 driven by the availability of mobile money. M-Pesa has also been credited with lifting roughly 2% 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 receive international money transfers, save and access credit, all from the convenience of their mobile phones and wherever they may be in the countries served, utilising more than 500,000 M-Pesa agents.

In June 2021, the M-Pesa Super App was launched across all its markets, enabling customers and businesses to accomplish day-to-day tasks, like shopping and accessing government services, without having to download different apps for each task.

M-Pesa’s second facet focuses on businesses by expanding its ecosystem to deliver innovative solutions across micro businesses, SMEs and large businesses.

These include an open API in use by more than 45,000 developers and 200,000 businesses, the M-Pesa for Business Super App, the Transacting Till that enables businesses to go beyond receiving payments to making business payments, and Pochi La Biashara that enables small businesses to separate their personal and business funds. Collectively, more than 500,000 businesses transact more than US$7-billion (€5.8-billion) every month on M-Pesa.