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Mobile money transfer platform Mpesa has been voted Kenya’s leading superbrand.In a survey carried out by top urban consumers and undertaken by Kantar TNS in Nairobi, Mombasa, and Kisumu, leading telecommunications firm Safaricom, which owns the MPESA brand, came in second.It is the fourth year on the trot that MPESA has won this accolade, coming at a time the Covid-19 pandemic has hit the country’s economy.

Safaricom’s M-PESA has been named as Kenya’s top superbrand.The mobile money product was also ahead of its parent company, Safaricom, in the last survey.Safaricom was placed second during this period’s review.The announcement implies that M-PESA’s continues to be solidified, and continues to play a key role in the running of SMEs.

The partnership between Family Bank Limited and London-based financial technology firm SimbaPay will enable the 23,946,174 active M-Pesa users in Kenya to send money to over 1 billion active WeChat subscribers in China.

That’s how mobile money accounts first came about. Mobile money apps don’t require a brick-and-mortar bank, but they otherwise end up functioning a lot like a bank account and debit card would for an American — meaning your average person in Kenya with such an account now has access to most of the same financial services a person in the US does. Mobile money got off the ground early in the developing world, where people used texting-based services before smartphones became common. There were early attempts to set up such systems in the 2000s in South Africa and the Philippines. But the breakthrough was the extraordinary early success of Kenya’s M-Pesa, which actually predates apps like Venmo. (“Pesa” is Swahili for money; the “M” stands for “mobile.”) The project that became M-Pesa started in 2002 when phone companies noticed that they had unintentionally invented something that almost resembled a currency.

This article explores the austere labour regime of Safaricom – Kenya's largest telecommunications firm and financial services provider – from the perspective of the women and men who work as ‘human ATMs’ for Safaricom's breakout service, M-Pesa. Far from women and men simply acting as ATMs, I argue that the affective and social labour of these people working at sites across the country constitutes a form of maintenance work that, while essentially free in Safaricom's accounts, critically underwrites the success of M-Pesa and Safaricom.

I argue that the work of ‘human ATMs’ constitutes both the ‘front story’ and the ‘backstory’ of contemporary modes of accumulation unfolding in Kenya. Their labour is formally exploited while broader forms of work required to build and maintain the social and material networks on which Safaricom depends are expropriated, forming the basis of new frontiers of accumulation. This process is mirrored in Safaricom's contemporary business strategy, which is premised on enclosing people's everyday habits and social networks in their digital forms as sites of innovation and market-making.

The Impact of Mobile Payments on the Success and Growth of Micro-Business: The Case of M-Pesa in Kenya | Journal of Language, Technology & Entrepreneurship in Africa

M-Pesa has 20.5 million customers across a network of 176,000 agents and generates around one-fourth ($531 million) of Safaricom’s ≈ $2.2 billion annual revenues (2018). The company has held nearly 75% of the mobile-money market share in Kenya for nearly a decade and the country has the highest mobile-money usage rates in Africa.

M-Pesa “grew at a blistering pace following its inception in 2007.” [1] In less than two years from its launch, M-Pesa had become the leading money transfer method in the country, with over 50 percent of people sending money via M-Pesa and over 65 percent receiving funds through the system in 2009. By 2015 there were 19.9 million active M-Pesa users, up 18 percent from 2013/14. It is said that 43 percent of Kenya's GDP flowed through M-Pesa, with over 237 million person-to-person transactions.

M-Pesa is an SMS-based system that enables users to deposit, send and withdraw funds using their mobile phone. Customers do not need to have a bank account and can transact at any of the country's 40,000 agent outlets. Registration and deposits are free and pricing for most other transactions is based on a tiered structure to allow even the lowest-income users to use the system. Transaction values are typically small, ranging from US$5 to US$30.

Got paid through PayPal? That's great, now you can easily withdraw the funds to your M-PESA, and use them any way you like. Need to pay your bills? No problem - your latest PayPal payment can be waiting for you on your M-PESA. Yeah, it's that easy. Why limit your shopping experience? It's now easier for you to top up your PayPal account, and shop around the world. Just transfer your M-PESA balance to your PayPal account, and get ready to shop almost anywhere, anytime.

Mobile Money: The Economics of M-PESA | NBER

Mobile Money and Financial Development: The Case of M-PESA in Kenya by Scott Burns :: SSRN

Over seven million customers and businesses in Kenya will now access SimbaPay’s international money transfer service to send money to China’s WeChat Pay from Family Bank’s PesaPap mobile banking application and USSD service. Non-customers too will enjoy the service via a dedicated PayBill number 261059 on MPESA.

In Kenya, mobile money is almost synonymous with Safaricom’s M-Pesa.

When Kenya’s leading telco Safaricom introduced M-Pesa in 2007, it started out as a simple transfer service that allowed users to send and receive money with their mobile phones. Safaricom has since rolled out other M-Pesa services like loans and payments.

SimbaPay is an award winning mobile app transforming the international remittance space. With a focus on extreme speed, convenience and constant innovation. Customers are able to send money to loved ones or even merchants, from wherever they are at any time of day or night. The company is headquartered in London and can be found online at www.SimbaPay.com SimbaPay is licensed and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.

SimbaPay is an award winning mobile app transforming the international remittance space. With a focus on extreme speed, convenience and constant innovation.

Drawing on the existing knowledge of African development from previous publications, Yes Africa Can: Success Stories from a Dynamic Continent takes an in-depth look at 26 economic and social development successes in Sub-Saharan African countries?twenty from individual countries and six that cut across the region. These stories manifest at the project, provincial, sub-national, national, or regional level and across themes, programs, and sectors. The book aims to address how Sub-Saharan African countries have overcome major development challenges. The main components of each case study include: (i) a description of the achievement and the elements that qualify the outcome as successful; (ii) an assessment of the main policies, interventions, actions, and other factors that contributed to the positive outcome; (iii) a presentation of the lessons learned and the contribution to the discourse on African development; and (iv) insights on the usability or applicability of the achievement in terms of the potential for scaling up the interventions and actions. Individual case studies also examine the role of the key stakeholders?the government, donors, or private investors?in facilitating and promoting the achievement. The studies are classified into four categories: overcoming or avoiding massive government failure, rebuilding or creating a government, rationalizing government involvement in markets, and listening to the people.