Tech in Africa
World-leading mobile money payment service M-Pesa has reached 50 million active monthly customers cementing its position as Africa’s largest fintech. M-Pesa launched 14 years ago in Kenya and today has a presence in Uganda, Tanzania, Lesotho, DRC, Egypt, and Ghana. Safaricom and Vodafone jointly launched M-Pesa in 2007 for the instant sending of money by customers to each other. For many, this became the only access to financial services propelling fast growth and adoption across the country.
Today M-Pesa offers financial convenience for both businesses and customers. The latter can send, receive money, pay bills, make and receive business payments, and much more. All activity takes place through the mobile phone, not to mention the 500,000 agents spread across the counties served.
M-Pesa Africa is also working towards offering digitized platforms as it works to become the region’s largest fintech and digital ecosystem for the continent. In June 2021 M-Pesa rolled out its M-Pesa Super App across all markets it serves.
The app provides over 50 million customers with modern, intuitive, and secure ways of transaction via their smartphones. M-Pesa also has an open API used by over 45,000 developers and 200,000 businesses. Collectively, over half a million businesses transact over $7 billion monthly on M-Pesa.
