NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Friday, December 12, 2014

Vodacom aims to push the envelope with its revamped M-Pesa in 2015, a year in which it hopes it will emerge as the most disruptive player in the local mobile money space.

This comes about four years after it originally launched in SA, in August 2010, and received a lukewarm response from local consumers – despite the servicehaving been a hit in other African countries.

According to Herman Singh, Vodacom’s managing executive of mobile commerce, four months along the new mobile money road, SA’s M-Pesa has in this time proven to be the fastest growing iteration of all 10 countries where it has launched. “Benchmarked against an international baseline, SA is now doing really well.”

When M-Pesa officially re-launched at the end of July this year, Vodacom said it aimed to garner a million users in the space of a year – and 10 million in five. One million is about the amount of users the service managed to previously drum up between 2010 and 2014.

Today, says Singh, M-Pesa has 700 000 users active on the system – although about 300 000 more than that applied, but were rejected because they were either under 16 years of age, or not in possession of a South African passport.