A single interaction in Nairobi can tell you everything you need to know about how money moves in Kenya.
A matatu conductor doesn’t ask if you have cash. He doesn’t even slow down the transaction. He simply says “M-Pesa,” types a number into his phone, and moves on to the next passenger while you finish calculating your fare. That small exchange carries shows what happens when a mobile money system stops being an option and becomes the default way people transact.
Nineteen years after its launch, M-Pesa has gone far beyond its original purpose of helping unbanked Kenyans send money. It now sits underneath a large share of daily economic activity in the country, shaping how people pay, save, borrow, and even prove their creditworthiness.
For anyone building fintech products in Africa, it also raises a useful question: what does real scale actually look like when a financial product becomes part of everyday life?
From a Simple Transfer Tool to National Financial Infrastructure
When Safaricom launched M-Pesa in 2007, the goal was narrow. Many Kenyans did not have bank accounts, but mobile phone usage was already widespread. The idea was to let people send money through basic phones using airtime-like transfers.
At the time, fewer than 30% of Kenyan adults had access to formal banking services. That gap between mobile penetration and financial access became the opening M-Pesa was built on.
The adoption that followed was gradual at first, then compounding.
By 2024, financial inclusion in Kenya had risen to 84.8%. M-Pesa now serves over 40 million monthly active users in Kenya and more than 70 million customers across markets including Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Lesotho, Ghana, and Egypt.
The scale shows up most clearly in daily usage patterns:
Around 2,600 transactions are processed every second in Kenya
In the financial year ending March 2025, M-Pesa moved about Sh38.3 trillion in transaction value
It now contributes roughly 41.5% of Safaricom’s total revenue
What started as a money transfer service has effectively become a core layer of economic infrastructure.
The System Behind the System
The agent network
The part of M-Pesa most people interact with is digital, accessed through the phone. The part that keeps it running is physical.
Across Kenya, there are about 298,900 M-Pesa agents. These agents sit in kiosks, shops, markets, and rural trading centers. They allow users to deposit and withdraw cash instantly, bridging the gap between digital balances and physical currency.
This structure matters because it solves a problem many digital-only fintechs struggle with: cash is still deeply embedded in everyday African commerce. Without a physical conversion layer, adoption would likely have been far more limited outside urban centres.
Merchants and Everyday Commerce
M-Pesa also became embedded in business transactions much earlier than many other mobile money systems.
Today, around 633,000 businesses accept payments through Lipa Na M-Pesa. Alongside them are hundreds of thousands of micro-merchants using Pochi La Biashara, including motorcycle taxi operators, food vendors, and small kiosks.
For many of these businesses, M-Pesa functions as:
A payment system
A record of daily sales
A substitute for formal bookkeeping
Over time, that transaction history has taken on a second life. Lenders and fintech companies increasingly rely on it as a proxy for income verification and credit assessment. In many cases, consistent M-Pesa activity is more useful than traditional bank statements, especially for informal businesses that never had access to them in the first place.
How M-Pesa Expanded Beyond Payments
Once payments became routine, Safaricom began layering additional financial services on top of the same infrastructure.
The pattern is consistent: instead of building separate systems, new products plug directly into the M-Pesa wallet and its transaction history.
Ziidi and Retail Investing
One of the clearest examples is Ziidi, a money market fund integrated into M-Pesa and developed with partners including the Nairobi Securities Exchange and Kestrel Capital.
It lowered the entry barrier for investing dramatically, allowing users to start with as little as KES 100.
The growth has been striking:
About 130,000 users in September 2024
Around 4.3 million users by March 2026
To put that in context, traditional collective investment schemes in Kenya serve roughly 300,000 people in total. Ziidi alone has surpassed that entire base.
Credit Built on Transaction History
Credit has followed a similar path.
Products such as Fuliza Biashara and the Taasi loans (Taasi Till and Taasi Pochi) are designed for small merchants who already use M-Pesa daily but lack formal credit histories.
Instead of relying on collateral or traditional credit scores, lending decisions are increasingly influenced by:
Transaction frequency
Cash flow consistency
Wallet activity patterns
This shift has quietly changed what “creditworthiness” looks like for a large segment of small businesses.
Cross-border and Global Payments
More recently, M-Pesa has begun extending beyond domestic transactions.
A virtual Visa card linked directly to the wallet now allows users to pay for global services such as Netflix, Amazon, and Apple. This removes the need for a separate bank-issued international card and brings global payments closer to the same interface people already use for local commerce.
Why This Matters Beyond Kenya
The trajectory M-Pesa has followed is increasingly relevant across Africa.
According to GSMA, the continent now has over 500 million active mobile money accounts processing more than $830 billion annually. At the same time, fintech revenue across Africa is projected by Boston Consulting Group to grow from around $10 billion today to over $65 billion by 2030.
But the growth opportunity is shifting.
Payments are already widely adopted. The larger gaps remain in:
Access to credit (with over half of African adults still underserved)
SME financing (with an estimated $330 billion funding gap)
Savings and investment access for low-income users
This is where the next phase of mobile money expansion is heading: financial products built directly on top of payment systems that already reach mass adoption.
The Prevalent Gap
Even with its success, M-Pesa highlights some of the structural limits of Africa’s financial systems. The biggest challenge is interoperability.
A user in Kenya cannot seamlessly send money to a mobile money user in Tanzania, even though both operate within the East African Community. Different operators, regulations, and settlement systems still create fragmentation.
Regional efforts like the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) and broader integration under the African Continental Free Trade Area are attempting to reduce this friction.
In many ways, the constraint is no longer technological. It is regulatory and institutional.
In SummarY
M-Pesa’s evolution offers a clear pattern: a system designed for basic money transfers can gradually become the backbone of an entire financial ecosystem when three things align: distribution, trust, and repetition.
What began as a way to move money without a bank account now sits at the centre of payments, lending, savings, and even cross-border commerce in Kenya.
The most interesting part is not the scale itself, but how it was achieved. There was no sudden leap. It was built through agent networks in kiosks, small transaction fees, and low entry thresholds that made participation effortless.
For the rest of Africa’s fintech ecosystem, M-Pesa serves as both reference point and warning. The next wave of growth is unlikely to come from payments alone, but from what gets built on top of them once they become invisible.
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