Visa has teamed up with Kenyan telecom Safaricom, operator of the M-Pesa mobile money product, on payments and tech.
Thus, the partnership opens up M-Pesa’s own extensive financial services network in East Africa to Visa’s global merchant and card network across 200 countries. Furthermore, the companies will also collaborate ‘on development of products that will support digital payments for M-Pesa customers’, according to a Safaricom press release.
M-Pesa is very popular among Kenyans, as the product’s easy to use and allows transfers and payments on any basic mobile phone via SMS. According o TechCrunch, Kenya has one of the highest mobile-money penetration rates in the world. This is largely due to the dominance of M-Pesa in the country, which stands as Africa’s sixth largest economy. Across Kenya’s population of 53 million, M-Pesa has 24.5 million customers and a network of 176,000 agents. The product’s mobile money market share in the country has hovered above 75% for years.
Since launching M-Pesa in Kenya in 2007, Safaricom has expanded the product to additional East African countries and added to the platform financial options, such as lending and small business.
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