Safaricom’s mobile money service M-Pesa has reached 30 million monthly users in Kenya.
M-PESA reached the milestone a few days after marking its 15th year since its launch on 6 March 2007. Kenya continues to be the most active M-PESA market, with more than 30 million of the service’s 51 million subscribers spread across Kenya, Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Lesotho, Ghana, and Egypt.
The company, which is Africa’s largest fintech, processes more than 61 million transactions a day across its different markets.
“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 usage has been driven by various innovations, including the launch of financial services such as M-Shwari, KCB M-PESA, and Fuliza. In addition to local partnerships, Safaricom has also established global partnerships that allow customers to send and receive money, and to make payments across the globe, including with PayPal, AliExpress, and Western Union.
Over the last two years, M-PESA has experienced explosive growth in commercial usage, with the number of businesses accepting payments via its Lipa Na M-PESA service more than doubling from 173,000 in April 2020 to more than 387,000 today.
Currently, Safaricom and Vodacom are focusing on growing the service in other markets, with the goal of bringing them to the same level of maturity as Kenya. Both organisations announced the launch of M-PESA Africa in April 2020 to consolidate M-PESA’s resources, strategy, and roadmap across the continent.
