Kenya’smobilemoneystory:therunawaysuccessofM-Pesa

Development finance and corporate banks alike have long wrestled with the issue of banking the unbanked in the developing world, which would encourage broad-based socio-economic development on the one hand, as well as greater product distribution for the private sector banking institutions.

However, bringing greater financial inclusion to the bottom of the pyramid no longer means universal branch bank account ownership. Nowhere is this more evident than in Africa, particularly in one of the continent’s emerging fintech hubs, Kenya.

In 2006, before M-Pesa was launched, 25% of Kenyans had access to banking products. By 2014, this figure had jumped to 68%. Almost half of these users do not have a formal bank account, indeed, formal banking sector inclusion in Kenya remains as low as 23%. However, the M-Pesa platform performs the essential financial transactions:  deposit and withdraw money, transfer money to other M-Pesa users and non-users, pay bills and purchase airtime. M-Pesa agents are as ubiquitous as pavement airtime kiosks, whose owners have been duly trained and are incentivised by clipping a commission per M-Pesa transaction. This is the kind of distribution network that most ATM-driven banks can only dream about.

This context is not unique to Kenya. Small wonder then that Sub-Saharan Africa is a global leader in the use of mobile money technology. On average 16% of the adult population actively uses a mobile money product in the region; the global average is 2%. Of the 18 countries in the world that have more mobile money accounts than bank accounts, only one, Paraguay, is not in Africa.

The significance of M-Pesa and the mobile money products like it is the potential it holds for retail financial access in the developing world and the money to be made in doing so. As the trail-blazer in this innovation space, Safaricom now generates a reported 10% of its revenue through providing a transactional banking platform for that segment of the population conventional financial institutions did not consider worth it to bank.

[Reprinted with permission from Observer Research Foundation].

by Lucy Corkin

Read the full story originally published by Observer Research Foundation website here.

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