M-PESA Global is a service that enables M-PESA registered customers to send and receive money globally. Kenyan M-PESA customers will be able to send funds to East Africa (Rwanda, Tanzania & Uganda), globally (to millions of Bank accounts and over 500,000 Western Union locations globally), and Paypal. Also, M-PESA registered customers could receive funds from abroad on their M-PESA account. Looking at it critically, this product is becoming an operating system, connecting Kenyans to other domains in the world, on transfer and remittance of money.
And it is growing; according to Safaricom, the mobile operator which owns it, M-Pesa Global handled Sh101 billion (about $976 million) or a third of all diaspora remittances into Kenya in the financial year ended March. This product has the capability of becoming that special fintech product I had posited that Africa needs. Pity Kenyan banks!
“The company rolled out the international money transfer business through its 100 percent owned subsidiary, Instaconnect Limited, and injected additional capital by acquiring assets worth Sh397 million and a cash transfer of Sh10 million,” Safaricom says in its latest annual report.
“We expect that due to the above investment, there will be more activity that will have a positive impact on the reported results of full year to March 2020 from the operations of the new businesses.”
Safaricom says the international money transfer business, branded M-Pesa Global, handled Sh101 billion or a third of all diaspora remittances into the country in the year ended March.
The platform allows customers to send and receive money, make payments and participate in international e-commerce through partnerships with other payment platforms such as Western Union, PayPal and AliExpress.
Simply, this product has the capability of becoming that special fintech product I had posited that Africa needs (the video on click). But it has to find new markets urgently.
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The numbers look good, considering the limited market it’s operating in, it can easily handle 50% of the remittances there. But scaling across Africa will be difficult, because other countries have been operating under different systems, with the banks doing everything possible to remain in the loop.
If regulatory bottlenecks can be overcome, people simply want payment platform or system that is simple, seamless and cost little to perform transactions on.
We hope for better convergence in the near future, as the evolution continues.
“But scaling across Africa will be difficult, because other countries have been operating under different systems, with the banks doing everything possible to remain in the loop.” It comes down to cost of service. If far cheaper, they have a chance.