Safaricom and Vodacom have announced that they have completed the acquisition of the M-PESA brand, product development and support services from Vodafone through a newly-created joint venture.
The deal kicked off in 2019 is expected to accelerate M-PESA’s growth in Africa by giving both Vodacom and Safaricom the opportunity to expand M-PESA into new African markets.
M-PESA is currently the largest payments platform on the African continent, it has 40 million users and processes over a billion transactions every month. M-PESA is operational in Kenya, Tanzania, Lesotho, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, Mozambique and Egypt. Currently around 25% of all M-PESA customers have access to a smartphone – a figure that is growing by 10% every year.
Michael Joseph, outgoing Safaricom CEO had this to say, “For Safaricom, we’re excited that the management, support and development of the M-PESA platform has now been relocated to Kenya, where the journey to transform the world of mobile payments began 13 years ago. This new partnership with Vodacom will allow us to consolidate our platform development, synchronise more closely our product roadmaps, and improve our operational capabilities into a single, fully converged Centre of Excellence.”