Within the first month after launch Safaricom registered over 20,000 M-PESA customers. The average number of new registrations per day exceeded 5,000 in August that year and reached nearly10, 000 in December. Today 15 million Kenyans use M-PESA, and have transferred about 20 per cent of National GDP through the system.
Before the launch of M-PESA in Kenya, statistics on financial access show that the formal financial system was serving just over (26.4%) of Kenya’s adult population, at the time Kenya had only 450 bank branches and about 600 ATM , in other words less than 2 bank branches per every 100,000 population.
As w
e mark 5 years today since M-Pesa was launched, M-PESA has over 35,000 agents in Kenya, and about 70 % of financial transactions are now handled by M-PESA, which is a ubiquitous venue for utility bills, water purchases, farm equipment purchases, payroll, goods and services and international money transfers.
Today over 700 businesses have integrated with M-PESA to extend various innovative services to all Kenyans at lower cost to the people in remote areas. Such business include online businesses like Rupu, Zetu Deals, Capital Fm Deals among others. Many business have also named their products and innovation around M-Pesa such as CIC Insurance‘s M-Bima, Equity Bank’s M-Kesho, M-Soko, M-Sacco among others.
M-Pesa has also made other players in the Money transfer business to re-invent themselves to innovatively come up with products that ride on it as well as levaranging on the M-Pesa market to increase their market share. Not only has M-Pesa been advantegious to many Kenyans but it has also been a disadvantage too others, some business with old dog skills have been forced out of business, in addition to illegal business deals.
