Kenya’s leading telecommunications company, Safaricom, has launched a series of nationwide events as it prepares to celebrate its 25th anniversary.
The year-long celebrations will engage key stakeholders in the ecosystem, including customers, investors, communities, technology partners, employees, and regulators.
These activities are also part of the celebrations to commemorate 18 years since the official launch of M-Pesa.
As part of the celebrations, Safaricom will reward customers and partners with airtime and other tokens for “being part of this incredible journey.”
“The campaign will also serve as a platform to reassure M-Pesa customers of Safaricom’s commitment to provide a worry-free, safe, and secure financial ecosystem to its customers,” Safaricom CEO Peter Ndegwa said.
Speaking on Friday during an event to mark M-pesa’s 18th birthday, Ndegwa held that the platform has transformed the lives of millions of customers, empowering them with useful and affordable financial services.
He said, “With increasing smartphone usage across the continent, they are transitioning to be a digital financial services provider connecting customers and businesses to opportunities and powering their growth through our tech-powered solutions.”
With more people across the continent shifting to smartphones, 3G and 4G broadband, M-Pesa is today evolving to become a digital financial services provider.
By empowering over 32.1 million customers to transact, save or borrow money through their mobile phones, M-Pesa has driven financial inclusion in Kenya to 83.7 per cent in 2021 from a low of 26.7 per cent in 2006 and generated over Sh139.9 Billion in revenue as at 2024.
As part of the 18-year celebrations, Safaricom has also launched Ziidi Investment platform with Ziidi Money Market Fund which allows contributions starting from Sh100, with a daily limit of Sh500,000.
The platform which currently boasts over one million opt-ins, got regulatory approvals in November last year and over Sh6 billion in funds.
It also set to introduce Shariah-compliant investments with an aim to grow customers’ wealth.
Ziidi leverages the convenience of M-pesa to give customers a simple, faster, and smarter way to invest and grow wealth.
According to Safaricom’s Chief Financial Services Officer Esther Waititu, the company is scaling the M-Pesa platform to support additional digital services, faster development of new products, and achieve increased stability and reliability.
“M-Pesa’s future success will be based on its ease of use, and its seamless integration with other services and products to give customers a comprehensive suite of financial services at their fingertips. M-Pesa represents the future of mobile financial services across the continent,” she stated.
As M-Pesa continues to innovate more products and services and launch new ones, it looks forward to celebrating many more anniversaries with its staff and customers in the years to come.
M-pesa is currently available in more than 170 countries globally serving over 70 million customers.
The mobile financial services provider has grown to over one million businesses and agents in Kenya, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Ghana and Egypt.
The service also supports over 55,000 integrations on its Daraja platform which hosts more than 100,000 developers.
With its current capacity of 4,000 transactions per second, the platform processes over 100 million transactions a day, making it Africa’s largest fintech solution.
