Safaricom and Mastercard announced on Thursday that they have signed a partnership to accelerate adoption of payment acceptance and cross-border remittance services in Kenya.
Under the terms of the partnership, Safaricom will embed Mastercard’s omnichannel acceptance solutions for the 636,000 merchants using Safaricom’s mobile money service M-Pesa.
Safaricom said that combining M-Pesa’s extensive merchant network and Mastercard’s global payment infrastructure will scale digital payments across Kenya by making more seamless, secure, and scalable payment solutions available to merchants. That in turn would also enable them to serve customers across global markets.
The partnership will also boost remittance services, streamlining cross-border transactions efficiently, said Safaricom’s chief financial services officer Esther Waititu.
“This collaboration with Mastercard unlocks new opportunities for M-Pesa merchants,” Waititu said in a statement. “By combining our expertise with Mastercard’s global acceptance network, we are enabling businesses to provide more efficient and frictionless payment solutions to their customers, both in Kenya and beyond.”
According to analyst firm GlobalData, Kenya’s mobile wallet payments market has grown at a rate of 12.7% CAGR between 2020 and 2024, driven by a rise in consumer spending and a high consumer preference for mobile-based payments. GlobalData is forecasting 5.7% growth in 2024 to reach KES8.4 trillion (US$60.1 billion).
The firm credits mobile wallet growth in Kenya to several factors, from the popularity of M-Pesa to the rising popularity of QR code-based payments, which itself has been helped along by the introduction of the Kenya Quick Response Code (KE-QR Code) Standard last year.
As of July 2024, M-Pesa had over 51 million customers.
