M-Pesa, Africa’s largest fintech provider, which was in March 2007; is celebrating 15 years today.
The Kenyan-headquartered firm initially allowed users perform money transfers between people using 2G feature phones.
Since then, M-Pesa has grown to serve more than 51 million customers and 465,000 businesses. The service is provided by 600,000 agents across Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Ghana and Egypt.
Presently, the fintech company processes more than 61 million transactions a day, making it Africa’s largest fintech provider, and it has attracted 42,000 external developers to create additional services for the platform.
With more people across the African continent shifting to smartphones, and using 3G and 4G broadband, M-Pesa is evolving to become a digital financial services provider. In 2021, M-Pesa Africa launched the M-Pesa Super App and M-Pesa Business Super App which enables any business on the service to run a virtual storefront providing their services through M-Pesa Mini Apps.
Peter Ndegwa, CEO Safaricom, said: “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 per cent 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.”
Nick Read, Chief Executive Officer, Vodafone Group said: “As the original mobile money service, M-Pesa has been the most significant driver of financial inclusion in Africa over the past 15 years. It is the continent’s largest fintech platform and provides access to financial services for more than 50m people – in a secure, affordable, and convenient way. M-Pesa is a great example of how a regional platform can evolve and grow to meet and anticipate customer needs using smartphone technology – from peer-to-peer money transfer, to payment of utility bills, to enabling the payroll of businesses, and to financial services such as micro-loans.”
The 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 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.
