Safaricom‘s M-PESA has crossed 30 million monthly active users in Kenya, just days after it marked its 15th year since its launch on 6th March 2007. Kenya accounts for more than 30 million of the service’s 51 million customers across Kenya, Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Lesotho, Ghana and Egypt.
“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.
The growth in M-PESA customer usage has been driven by the launch of various innovations over the years including financial services such as M-Shwari, KCB M-PESA and 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.
The last two years have seen M-PESA record explosive growth in business usage with the number of businesses accepting payments on its Lipa Na M-PESA service more than doubling from 173,000 in April 2020 to more than 387,000 today.
Safaricom and Vodacom are focusing on growing the service in other markets with a goal of bringing them to the same level of maturity as Kenya. The two organisations announced the launch of M-PESA Africa in April 2020 with a goal of consolidating M-PESA’s resources, strategy and roadmap across the continent.
M-PESA Africa is investing in a common platform that will empower all markets to offer M-PESA’s entire range of services and products. It has also invested in an M-PESA Super App both for customers and for businesses, with the customer app available in Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In addition, M-PESA Africa is looking at growing continental and global partnerships with other financial service providers to introduce new International Money Transfer solutions.
Safaricom keeps over 41.9 million customers connected and play a critical role in the society, supporting over one million jobs both directly and indirectly while our total economic value was estimated at KES 358.6 Billion ($3.58 Billion) for the 12 months through March 2021.
Listed on the Nairobi Securities Exchange and with annual revenues of over KES 250 Billion ($2.5 billion), Safaricom provides connectivity through wide range of technology, 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G in aggregate covering over 99% of Kenya’s population.
