Safaricom M-Pesa Africa
“Can Africa's dominant mobile money rail become the embedded-finance distribution layer for credit, insurance, wealth, and cross-border on a continent that skipped cards?”
Launched 2007 as a peer-to-peer mobile money service on Safaricom's GSM network, M-PESA evolved into the dominant payments rail in Kenya (~90% of mobile money) and East Africa. M-PESA Africa is the joint venture between Safaricom and Vodacom that operates the platform across multiple African markets. The company is now pushing beyond payments into a full financial supermarket — embedded credit (Fuliza, Taasi, Faraja BNPL), insurance (Tuunza Mapato, device insurance via SIAL), wealth (Ziidi MMF), cross-border (M-PESA Global via TerraPay), and card issuance (Visa GlobalPay) — using bank partners as the regulated balance sheet.