“ I don’ t think it’ s an exaggeration to say that mobile payments in Kenya has been the equivalent of PASPA being repealed in the US, as without the mobile payment structure, the online betting industry in Kenya wouldn’ t exist”
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Africa report Payments and the telcos
and institutions, including those on low incomes and rural communities. It added that the future growth of mobile money services in sub-Saharan Africa will be largely driven by the interoperability of mobile money services, which would give users the ability to transfer between customer accounts held with different system players.
The dominance of the M-Pesa payment channel in Kenya means that when the Kenyan authorities wanted to effectively shut SportPesa down last summer, all they had to do was order M-Pesa to stop allowing transactions. According to Safaricom, gaming-related revenues at M-Pesa did indeed tumble during the year, falling by KES175m to KES1.9bn a month, with then financial director Sateesh Kamath saying that,“ through the course of this year I would expect even that to unwind”. He added:“ So we should have one more year left for gaming to bottom out.”
BEYOND KENYA
Safaricom has launched M-Pesa is six other countries in Africa, including Tanzania, Ghana and DR Congo. Meanwhile, other telecoms groups have their own mobile money operations, including:
● MTN Group, with its MoMo mobile money business, says it has more than 22 million mobile money subscribers across 15 countries, among them Ghana and Uganda.
● Airtel and Airtel Money.
● Orange and Orange Money.
● Tigo with Tigo Cash and Tigo Pesa( the latter for Tanzania only).
● Vodacom, which as of April this year became a 50 % owner of M-Pesa with Safaricom. This proliferation of mobile money providers and solutions provides an entry point for mobile gambling, suggests Spark from Opera Gaming.“ While a bottomup approach has proven to be the most successful in many countries, I believe we are, naturally, moving online,” he says.“ Mobile money is, undoubtedly, the catalyst in markets with a largely unbanked punter base.”
Yet, despite the prevalence of mobile money solutions, there is as yet no provider with a pan- African reach. As Wilkie from Yellowbet suggests, this is likely due to the monopoly on mobile money on the part of the telcos.“ Some companies offer solutions in some countries, but nobody is yet to offer a transcontinental solution,” he says.
As it stands, a user with one of the mobile money providers will be blocked from completing a transaction from any other country, even if that is with the same mobile money provider.
Ed Birkin, analyst at H2 Gambling Capital, agrees that the lack of a continent-wide payments option is just one
“ I don’ t think it’ s an exaggeration to say that mobile payments in Kenya has been the equivalent of PASPA being repealed in the US, as without the mobile payment structure, the online betting industry in Kenya wouldn’ t exist”
ED BIRKIN, H2 GAMBLING CAPITAL
of the reasons that the African market is so diverse in terms of individual countries. However, he adds that the availability of mobile payment options is clearly a big driver for betting in any given market.
“ I don’ t think it’ s an exaggeration to say that mobile payments in Kenya has been the equivalent of PASPA being repealed in the US, iGB Market Monitor