The number of registered mobile money accounts hit a new record of 80.82 million in the 10 months to October last year attributed to increased use of digital payments methods due to their convenience.
This was a jump from 75.96 million in the same period a year earlier, according to data from the Central Bank of Kenya, indicating that many people have more than one registered phone wallet account.
Safaricom's M-Pesa and Airtel Money are the most popular mobile money platforms in the country.
The volume of mobile money transactions handled by agents in the review period rose to 2.076 billion from 2.01 billion in the previous year.
The data shows that the value of transactions facilitated by the agents increased to Sh7.24 trillion from Sh6.5 trillion, marking a 12.1 percent growth.
M-Pesa is the dominant mobile money platform in the country, with well over 97 percent of the local market share, with Airtel Money fighting for the remaining share with T-kash of Telkom Kenya and Equitel.
Customers on M-Pesa, Airtel Money, and other mobile money platforms sent and received the highest amount of cash in February 2024 at Sh790.8 billion while the lowest was in September at Sh670.5 billion.
M-Pesa is the single biggest revenue stream for Safaricom, highlighting the impact of mobile money services to the telco.
In the half year that ended in September 2024, Safaricom's revenue from M-Pesa in the Kenyan market grew 16.6 percent to Sh77.22 billion. This was driven by a 13.1 percent increase in the average revenue per user (ARPU) to Sh389.27.
The Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE) listed telco said the chargeable transactions per one-month active customers increased to 37.37 from 29.87.
One-month active customers grew by 4.1 percent to 33.46 million while M-Pesa agents rose by 2.4 percent to 266,070.
“We have seen great performance in new products like Pochi la Biashara and merchant overdraft products… the number of Pochi tills more than doubled to 869,020 while merchant overdraft customers grew 72.9 percent year-on-year to 52,270,” said Safaricom in the half year presentation.
The government through agencies like CBK has been pushing to expand uptake of mobile payments by removing barriers in the system, most recently being the removal of restrictions on moving money from M-Pesa to Airtel Money.
This was done through scrapping of a code that forced customers on Airtel Money to withdraw cash within a week of receipt or see the money revert to the sender.
Airtel removed the requirement for the code in February 2024, allowing its subscribers to receive money from any registered mobile money platform and notably feeding off the dominant M-Pesa.
