Safaricom And Visa Partner To Enable Global Digital Payment For M-Pesa

Kenya’s telecommunications giant Safaricom and Visa have announced a partnership that will see the development of products that will support digital payment for M-Pesa customers.

“We are delighted to partner with Via in exploring products that will support both our customers and Lipa Na M-Pesa merchants,” said Safaricom CEO Mr. Peter Ndegwa.

According to Mr. Ndegwa, the partnership will play an important role in delivering even more value to Safaricom’s customers “linking them to even more opportunities, especially in global e-commerce.

The partnership means M-Pesa customers will have no barrier to global commerce and will have an expanded set f e-commerce capabilities to merchants and consumers “by enabling secure and convenient cashless payment solutions.”

The partnership will cover over 24 million M-Pesa customers in Kenya, more than 170,00 Lipa Na M-Pesa merchants, more than 61 million merchant locations throughout Visa’s global network and more than 3.4 billion cards in more than 200 countries and territories.

Safaricom is the largest profit-making company in Kenya with a great percentage of the growth attributable to the growth of M-Pesa services.

The year ending March 2020, Safaricom registered record profits 74.7 billion shillings, a 19.5 percent growth as compared to the previous year. M-Pesa has been a great contributor to Safaricom’s profits.

For the year under review, it brought in 84.4 billion shillings to the company while data contributed a total of 40.7 billion shillings. In terms of revenue, Safaricom made 251 billion shillings from 240 billion shillings recorded the previous year.

Revenue from calls and SMSs have continued to decline. Traditionally, Safaricom used to make a lot of money from both calls and SMSs. For the current year, the revenue dropped by 1.4 percent to 94.5 billion shillings for calls, and by 12.3 percent to 17.2 billion shillings for messages.

Safaricom’s earnings before interest and tax moved past the 100 billion shilling mark to stand at 101.5 billion shillings from 89 billion shillings the previous year.

READ: Kenyans Spending 5,000,000 Hours Daily Of Continuous Viewing Using Safaricom Data