Kenyan Amazon Customers Will Soon Pay Using M-Pesa

Safaricom PLC says it is in talks with American technology giant Amazon to integrate M-PESA as a payment option when shopping. This will make it easier for those customers who use Amazon to shop and ship goods to Kenya.

“It is an important partnership as we go into new areas such as cloud,” Chief Executive Officer Peter. Safaricom in 2020 entered into a strategic agreement offering Amazon Web Services (AWS) to East African customers to quickly get started on AWS cloud and accelerate innovation.

Safaricom’s desire to introduce M-Pesa as a payment method on Amazon is in line with its expansion strategy. Other partnership agreements include Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holdings Ltd and PayPal Holdings Inc.

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For the financial year 2020, a total of 1.7 billion free transactions were done via M-Pesa between March and December 2020 with the transactions worth 4.4 trillion shillings.

“Safaricom customers made over 1.7 billion free transactions of KSh. 4.4 trillion between April and December 2020,” said Safaricom CEO Mr. Peter Ndegwa.

Currently, M-Pesa has more than 26.8 customers with at least 220,000 businesses having onboarded the Lipa Na M-Pesa feature. At the same time, M-Pesa is said to be supporting at least 5,000,000 micro SMEs in Kenya.

Total M-PESA transaction value grew 58.2 percent YoY to 22.04 trillion shillings while the volume of transactions grew 29.8 percent YoY to 11.68 billion shillings.

The business added 3.4Mn one month active M-PESA customers up 13.6 percent YoY to 28.31 million shillings in FY21 and M-PESA now accounts for 33.0 percent of service revenue.

“To cushion Kenyans from the rapid transmission of the Coronavirus, guided and in collaboration with the Central Bank of Kenya, the industry waived fees on; Person to Person (P2P) for transactions of KShs 1,000 and below, as well as Bank to M-PESA wallet and M-PESA wallet to bank transfers (C2B and B2C),” said Mr. Peter Ndegwa, Safaricom CEO.