"Businesses as well as Kenyans and expatriates with friends and family abroad send over $18 Billion to other African countries," Karanja said in the release. "Asia and Europe annually with several billion Kenya Shillings going through the SimbaPay network. Therefore, this service will offer Prime Bank's customers a world-class fully digital International Money Transfer service."

The new product — which piggy-backs on WeChat’s messaging service — is aimed at Kenyan merchants who purchase goods from China, Kenya’s largest import source.

Less than six months after becoming the first billion-dollar technology company in Egypt, Fawry has hit another milestone by surpassing the $2 billion market cap for the first time. Its stock has doubled in the last six months and closed at an all-time high of EGP 46.90 today, pushing its market cap to over EGP 32 billion. This makes it the fourth most valuable company listed on The Egyptian Exchange (EGX) and it seems that it’s only a matter of days before it takes the second position.

Sabry, a former salesperson at IBM Egypt, launched Fawry because he knew these issues kept Egypt’s economy from achieving its promise. The early years were lean as the company worked to convince tech-wary Egyptians that Fawry’s systems were secure—and that their money wouldn’t disappear into an electronic void.

Carbon Express enables users to initiate and complete transactions such as P2P transfers and bill payments from the keyboard without launching the Carbon App or leaving the current app that they are using. Instead, they will be able to access services from the touch of their keyboard enabling quicker Instagram or Whatsapp commerce.Carbon Express maintains the same PCI DSS compliant model of encryption, authentication, and security as Carbon’s other services, thereby guaranteeing the security of all transactions. The feature relies on the keyboard technology of smartphones to facilitate transactions. The technology adds a unique Carbon branded button to the customer’s smartphone keyboard which they can tap anytime to perform transactions. Think of sending an emoji but this time it’s real cash.

JUMO was set up by Andrew Watkins-Ball in 2014 in South Africa. It has grown from a team of 7 people to some 300 people in 2018, selling its products in six countries. In 2017 alone, JUMO granted 12.2 million loans to its customers all over the world.

The M-PESA cash merchants (or ‘agents’ in M-PESA parlance) pre-buy mobile money so that they can sell it against cash to the customers who come to their retail store for cash-in operations. They are investing their own working capital and are not intermediating someone else’s funds. For cash-out operations, they sell their cash and buy mobile money instead. Consequently, the cash and M-PESA balances that cash merchants manage and store are always their own.

The service will face stronger competition in the coming years. The Kenya Bankers Association -- representing 46 banks -- is introducing its own mobile payment platform that will allow convenient transfers between accounts at different banks, and the group hopes this will eat into M-Pesa's market share.

Perhaps the most influential and widely reported publication pushing forward this narrative is an article examining M-Pesa written by US-based economists Tavneet Suri and William Jack—and published in the prestigious journal Science—entitled ‘The Long-run Poverty and Gender Impacts of Mobile Money’.