Vodafone, and its subsidiaries Vodacom and Safaricom, today marked the 15th anniversary of M-Pesa, the service launched in Kenya in March 2007 to enable money transfers between people using 2G phones.
M-Pesa currently serves more than 51 million customers and 465,000 businesses. The mobile money service is provided by 600,000 agents across Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Ghana and Egypt.
M-Pesa processes more than 61 million transactions a day, making it Africa’s largest fintech provider. Vodafone Group said M-Pesa has attracted 42,000 external developers to create additional services for the mobile money platform.
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.
More than 9 million customers and 320,000 businesses have downloaded the M-Pesa Super App since its launch.
“M-Pesa is a great example of how a regional platform can evolve and grow to meet and anticipate customer needs using smartphone technology,” Nick Read, Chief Executive Officer, Vodafone Group said in a news statement.
M-Pesa Africa is revamping the M-Pesa platform to support additional digital services and development of new products. The platform revamp includes expansion of the M-Pesa APIs to provide developers with access to the service enabling them to deploy more innovations on the service.