Vodafone plans to turn its widely adopted M-Pesa mobile payments service into a pan-African financial platform, reports the Financial Times.
Established on 6th March 2007 by Vodafone's Kenyan associate, Safaricom, M-Pesa is Africa's leading mobile money service, with over 37 million active customers and almost 400,000 active agents operating across 7 countries: the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Mozambique and Tanzania.
“I believe we can turn it into Africa’s largest unbanked bank,” said Nick Read, chief executive of Vodafone. “To achieve this, we need to explore strategic technology partnerships and work with key financial institutions. I believe there is the opportunity to roll out M-Pesa into other countries where we do not have existing mobile operations when the platform is further developed.”
M-Pesa enables customers to send, receive and store money safely and securely via a basic smartphone. Most of Vodafone's markets have launched the M-Pesa smartphone app, providing customers with a digital platform to manage their M-Pesa accounts, and also to make faster purchases at merchant points via QR code.
