Safaricom’s largest revenue and money maker is about to get even bigger with speculations making rounds that its M pesa services will soon be used in Europe.This is a huge big time deal for the Telecommunication giant which recently partnered with Money gram,an international money transfer service company.The company’s profits have been on an upward curve,since the Company’s CEO Bob Colly more took over its management.
M-Pesa has nearly 17 million active customers and as many as 186,000 agents worldwide. Customers make more than €900 million (US$1.1 billion) worth of person-to-person transactions a month.The mobile payment system covers micro insurance, payrolls and even distributors like Diageo, which deliver beer to bars, take M-Pesa payments rather than have the delivery trucks go around with cash.Mpesa services was born when Safaricom partnered with Vodafone, the intention had been to develop a system for women for easy micro loans payment.However Safaricom’s management team looked at the application, they saw it had a greater potential. Kenyans now use it to pay school fees, taxes, traffic fines, and more recently it’s been extended to give people the ability to save and to borrow through M-shwari services which facilitate smaller interest rates.
Safaricom’s profits are surely expected to improve much higher than this year should the idea be initiated over seas and abroad as speculated and announced by Safaricom and Vodafone officials.”The majority of people in Romania have at least one mobile device, but more than one-third of the population do not have access to conventional banking,” said Vodafone director of mobile money, Michael Joseph.
“By Vodafone’s estimation, 35 percent of the Romanian population don’t use banking services and, if you look at Vodafone’s footprint in Europe, Romania is one of the places where M-Pesa stands the best chance of gaining adoption,” mobile analyst for IHS Technology Jack Kent told CNN.
