Safaricom has announced they’ve hit the 30 million Monthly Users milestone in Kenya. This comes as the service is celebrating 15 years since its launch on 6th March 2007.
Kenya is still M-Pesa’s most active market accounting for 30 million of the 51 million customers across Tanzania, DRC, Mozambique, Lesotho, Ghana and Egypt.
Safaricom and Vodacom say they’re now focusing on growing M-Pesa in other African countries to the same level of maturity as Kenya. In April 2020, the two launched M-Pesa Africa with the goal of consolidating M-Pesa’s resources, strategy and roadmap across the continent.
M-Pesa Africa is currently investing in a common platform that will empower all markets to enjoy the entire range of M-Pesa services and products. We’ve already seen the M-Pesa Super App for both customers and businesses, with the customer app already available in Kenya and Tanzania.
Safaricom says the growth in M-Pesa customer use has been driven by the launch of various innovations of the years including financial services such as M-Shwari, KCB M-Pesa, and the very successful Fuliza. Safaricom has equally established both local and global partnerships that enable customers to send and receive money, and to make payments across the world including with PayPal, AliExpress and Western Union.
In the last two years, M-Pesa has seen record explosive growth in businesses accepting payments on its Lipa na M-Pesa service with more than double grown from 173,000 businesses in April 2020 to more than 387,000 today.
“M-PESA’s success has been achieved on the back of consistent focus on the needs of our customers by ensuring that we are constantly delivering innovations that add value to their lives. We thank all our customers for getting us to the 30 million monthly active customers milestone. As the country goes digital with growing smartphone usage, we are committing to continue exploring and delivering life-changing innovations in a digital world” said Peter Ndegwa, CEO – Safaricom.
