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Africa report Payments and the telcos
Payments and the telcos
● Mobile money ● Safaricom and M-Pesa ● Beyond Kenya
● Nigeria and mobile payments
PART TWO
MOBILE MONEY
One thing that is absolutely central to the African betting scene is mobile money . To majority unbanked populations , mobile money has become the central means for transmitting payments and hence the primacy of mobile network operators .
Mobile money platforms run by the major mobile networks are headed by M-Pesa , the dominant form of money transfer in Kenya . Pesa means money in Swahili , so it is no surprise that SportPesa has picked up on its popularity and piggy-backed on the name .
“ M-Pesa has by far been the most successful mobile payment method in the gambling industry in Africa , and those countries that use M-Pesa such as Kenya , Uganda and Tanzania have led the way in online gaming activity ,” says Symmonds from Web Analysis Solutions .
Mobile money is built for so-called feature phones . It enables users to load money into a mobile wallet , which they can then use very much like an online bank account , depositing and withdrawing funds , transferring money , paying bills and purchasing airtime .
Mobile money is seen as a key plank of the push towards financial inclusion across Africa . The technology behind most of the mobile money networks – unstructured supplementary service data or USSD – enables small packets of data to be transferred over the network and is reckoned to be the most appropriate technology for lowincome customers as smartphone applications are seen as excluding the majority of the population .
USSD codes connect directly to a bank ’ s server and provide access to the bank account and transaction execution . All that is needed is a mobile phone number and a bank registration .
SAFARICOM AND M-PESA
M-Pesa is the brand owned by Safaricom , which itself is an offshoot of Vodafone , and which was launched in 2007 . M-Pesa is now worth a third of total revenues for Safaricom , generating KES84bn ( US $ 784m ) this year , representing a doubling of revenues since 2016 . In terms of customer reach , M-Pesa had just under 25 million one-month active users , or half of Kenya ’ s population of 51 million . iGB Market Monitor