M-Pesa is marking 15 years since Safaricom and Vodafone launched the service in March 2007. Since inception in Kenya, M-Pesa has grown to more than 51 million customers, 465,000 businesses, 600,000 agents and 42,000 developers across Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Ghana and Egypt.
The service currently processes more than 61 million transactions a day making it Africa’s largest fintech provider. The shift to 3G and 4G broadband smartphones have facilitated M-Pesa’s growth to a digital financial services provider. In 2021, M-Pesa Africa launched the Super App and an Business Super App which enable business on the service to run a virtual store front providing their services virtually through Mini Apps.
“We launched M-PESA back in 2007 in a bid to deepen financial inclusion for our customers by connecting them to useful and affordable financial services. In 15 years, we have seen population access to formal financial services grow to as high as 83% as we introduced additional services and reached more customers.” Safaricom CEO, Peter Ndegwa said.
Read: Huduma Namba Will Soon be a Requirement for Mpesa, Other Digital Transactions
As part of the 15 year celebrations, Safaricom will reward 15 customers and 15 businesses every hour for 15 days from March 7th 2022 to March 22nd 2022 for sending money or making payments through the M-PESA Super App and M-PESA Business Super App. The winners will be randomly selected and will get back 15% of the transaction value up to a maximum of KSh. 1,000.
The M-PESA Super App makes several services easily accessible including shopping, restaurants and food delivery, transport services and government services among others. Current statistics indicate that at least 9 million customers and 320,000 businesses have downloaded the M-Pesa Super App since its launch.
In addition to the Super App, M-Pesa Africa is revamping the platform to support more digital services, faster development of new products, and to achieve increased stability and reliability. 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.
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