Vodafone M-PESA now has reached more than 25 million active customers across its markets in Africa, Asia and Europe.
According to the Vodafone Group Director of Mobile Money, Michael Joseph, M-PESA has enhanced the lives and livelihoods of people without bank accounts and in essence given them access to financial services through their mobile phones.
The customer base for the service has increased by 27.1%to 25.3 million users as of 31st March, 2016 and this increase has been boosted by its the launches in Albania and Ghana.
“I am delighted and proud that M-PESA has reached the 25 million active customers milestone. M-PESA continues to expand, evolving beyond traditional money transfers to encompass savings and loans, payment of salaries and benefits, settlement of utility bills and school fees and to enable vital health and agricultural solutions.” said Michael Joseph
New features and Services
Vodafone M-PESA in its bid to innovate, it has added new features and services. It has entered into a partnership with the Ministry of Social Development in Lesotho to pay welfare grants using M-PESA. Kenya’s Ministry of Agriculture is now paying fertilizer subsidies using M-PESA. In India, the National Rural Livelihoods Mission utilizes M-PESA to enable financial inclusion for women’s groups and the National Rural Health Mission is using the service to disburse pre-natal health benefits.
The launch of an M-PESA smartphone app has enabled Indian customers to use M-PESA to pay for goods on Ebay, for taxis with TabCab and to book train tickets on India’s national railways. Enterprises including Walmart are using M-PESA in India to improve cash management and business efficiency.
Vodafone has also launched a service enabling customers to convert airtime to M-PESA credit to pay for emergency treatment. Also, hundreds of community health workers across seven hospitals and 67 clinics managed by Partners in Health are now paid using M-PESA and international children’s charity World Vision pays a portion of employee salaries using M-PESA.
In other countries such as Mozambique, Global Development Agencies can now use M-PESA to pay employee salaries, Qatar Airways and KLM now accept M-PESA for air tickets in Tanzania. Finally in Kenya Safaricom has partnered with healthcare finance organisations PharmAccess Foundation and CarePay to introduce M-Tiba, a mobile health wallet that channels money from donors and government meant for health services directly to recipients.
Vodafone Partnerships
Vodafone has signed global framework agreements with two international money transfer hubs: TransferTo and MFS For Africa, in a order to strengthen its partnerships with other money transfer operators around the world.
To add onto that, it has partnered with MTN Mobile Money to enable direct money transfers between M-Pesa and MTN customers in seven countries across East Africa. Vodafone has also launched international money transfer services in Romania, Lesotho and Albania.
Lastly, it has also entered into agreement with Vodacom, to enable their domestic mobile money services to be fully inter-operable.