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

Friday, October 20, 2017

Safaricom, Kenya’s largest telecom company and provider of the nation’s mobile money service, M-Pesa, has launched a new innovation center in Nairobi.

Named Safaricom Alpha, a priority of the incubator is to identify spending patterns on mPesa and turn those insights into additional Safaricom products — according to Chief Innovation Officer, Kamal Bhattacharya.

“Safaricom’s unique in that we have telco services and a financial services platform that connect nearly every household in Kenya largely on the basis of trade,” he told TechCrunch at Startup Battlefield Africa.

“We’d actually like to move beyond M-Pesa by leveraging its power as a social network to connect people to other product solutions,” said Bhattacharya.

Photo courtesy of Neil Palmer.