Safaricom mulls new digital Apps as MPESA marks 15 years

By Remie Otieno

Safaricom’s mobile money transfer service, M-PESA is this month marking 15 years since its launch in March 2007 – a service pioneered in partnership with British multinational telecommunications company, Vodafone.

The platform which generated over 765 million U.S. dollars in revenue in the financial year ending March 31, 2021, is ranked the world’s most innovative digital financial services provider with more than 51 million customers to date and 42,000 developers across seven African markets including Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Ghana and Egypt.

MPESA is also linked to 465,000 businesses, 600,000 agents with the service processing more than 61 million transactions a day making it Africa’s largest fintech provider.

Speaking while marking the celebrations, the firm’s Chief executive Peter Ndegwa said the company has lined up plans to launch a variety of digital solutions to increase financial inclusion targeting the unbanked customers.

“In 15 years, we have seen population access to formal financial services grow to as high as 83 percent 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,” said Safaricom’s Ndegwa.

Adding that M-PESA Africa has already embarked on revamping the M-PESA platform to support additional digital services, faster development of new products, and to achieve increased stability and reliability.

The platform revamp will include 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.

Since the Coronavirus pandemic hit more than two years ago, several businesses were presented with unprecedented challenges including lockdowns, containment measures, with demand shifts in response to Covid-19 pushing many of them to deploy digital financial solutions to not only serve their customers but also as a way to avoid direct contact with cash to curb the virus’ spread.

It has also seen public offices turn to digital payments with Mpesa services coming in handy.

Indeed, increasing the availability and usage of digital merchant payments has been a key driver in Kenya’s journey towards becoming a cash-lite economy.

Data from Safaricom’s Results Booklet shows that between March 2020 and March 2021 there was a 43 per cent increase in the number of active Lipa na M-PESA agents and a 75 per cent increase in the number of merchant tills.

This shows not only that many more businesses are accepting digital payments for the first time but also that those businesses already using digital payments are acquiring new tills, presumably to keep up with increased customer demand.