Safaricom’s Mobile Money platform has grown in leaps and bounds since its inception in 2007. In announcing the FY 2014/15 financial results, the Telco announced that the platform contributed 20% of the company’s total revenue with transactions of Shs 4.2 Trillion done using the platform. M-Pesa has 13.9 million monthly users with Safaricom continually innovating around the platform including the launch of Lipa na M-pesa merchant service, M-pesa surepay and M-shwari. Safaricom further relocated the M-pesa servers from Germany at a cost of $75 million to Kenya seeking to ensure better service delivery to M-Pesa customers.
At the recently held Emerging Payments Awards 2015 in London, M-Pesa managed to win two international accolades which are the Best P2P or Remittance Programme, and the Retail Innovation for Emerging Markets awards.According to Betty Mwangi, Safaricom’s Director for Financial Services, the telco was the only one of the nominiees that managed to win two out of the 21 Emerging Payment Awards. Over the years, M-Pesa has managed to win over 50 awards in International platforms besides serving as a benchmark for mobile money services. M-Pesa is currently used in 12 countries with Kenya being the most successful having over 80,000 agents supporting the M-Pesa ecosystem.
