The M-Pesa ecosystem is proving to be a crucial infrastructure for businesses and customers on the African continent. Currently, M-Pesa is enabling more than one million businesses fulfill different transactions.
According, to M-Pesa Managing Director Mr. Sitoyo Lopokoiyit, more than 70,000 developers have used the M-Pesa Open APIs. An Application Programming Interface (API) is simply how two different systems talk to each other. In the case of the M-Pesa ecosystem, the Open APIs enable payment receipt, automated payment disbursements, and payment reversal.
This machine-to-machine payment transfer has enabled M-Pesa to integrate with businesses and major financial players. Additional, M-Pesa ecosystem has been part of government digitalization. The eCitizen platform in Kenya is one such example.
M-Pesa Integration
Major financial players have integrated Mpesa into their business systems. This includes banks like Kenya Commercial Bank (KCB), NCBA, and more. Additionally, M-Pesa open APIs have enabled integration with major African fintech institutions like Flutterwave and KopoKopo.
M-Pesa already has M-Pesa Global. The service has enabled M-PESA customers to transact in over 170 countries across the globe. Recently, Safaricom announced a partnership with TerraPay adding to a roster of more than 35 global partners.
Meanwhile, M-Pesa is a partner with Visa. The partnership enables customers to make virtual payments globally and businesses on M-PESA to receive payments from customers. In addition, there is an expected partnership between M-Pesa and Apple.
M-Pesa is also set to become the first mobile platform to introduce standing orders for users.
M-Pesa Ecosystem in Africa
Established on 6th March 2007 by Vodafone’s Kenyan associate, Safaricom, M-PESA is Africa’s leading mobile money service with more than 800,000 active agents operating across the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Mozambique, and Tanzania.
The M-Pesa ecosystem serves more than 59 million customers across the continent. In the financial year 2022/2023, M-Pesa revenue grew 8.8% to KES 117.2 billion. This accounted for almost 40% of Safaricom PLC’s earnings. Hence, it is Safaricom’s most profitable service.
Daily, 5 M-PESA services cater to between 5 to 10 million customers. In a year, over $314 billion is transacted through the M-PESA ecosystem.
Kenya is where M-Pesa has most of its customers. In the country, more than $4 billion (KES 587 billion) is deposited every month into bank accounts through M-PESA. The service also enables banks to disburse more than $40 million in credit per day especially in microloans. According to a Competitions Authority of Kenya report, 74% of the digital loans in Kenya are from lending platforms associated with M-Pesa.
For example, in the first half of the current financial year KCB disbursed KES 154.3 billion in mobile loans.
Taking a look at Mozambique, M-Pesa has been in the country for a decade now. Today, the ecosystem supports more than 5.8 million customers with financial services across a network of 53,000 agents and 25,000 businesses.
In August, Safaricom officially launched its mobile banking service M-Pesa in Ethiopia. This was followed by the announcement of partnerships with banks that will provide agent, super-agent, and mobile banking services. Ethiopia is a massive investment for Safaricom and the launch of M-Pesa opens up the fintech ecosystem to Africa’s second-largest population.
