Vodafone Group announced that its mobile money service M-Pesa has reached 50 million monthly active customers, cementing its position as Africa's largest fintech platform. Launched more than fourteen years ago in Kenya, M-Pesa is today available in Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Ghana and Egypt.
The number of active M-Pesa customers has doubled in the past five years. The milestone comes eighteen months after Safaricom and Vodacom launched the M-Pesa Africa joint venture to accelerate growth of the service across the continent.
Recent growth also came from growing interest in electronic payments during the Covid-19 pandemic. M-Pesa transaction volumes increased 44 percent year-on-year in the first quarter of the current financial year. The number of transactions grew to 4.5 billion in the quarter, with a total transaction value of EUR 63 billion.
M-Pesa has evolved to a two-sided network that provides a wide variety of financial services to both businesses and individual customers. Customers can send and receive money, make and receive business payments, pay bills, make and receive international money transfers, save and access credit, all from their mobile phones and wherever they may be in the countries served, utilising more than 500,000 M-Pesa agents.
