M-Pesa Africa Posts First Operating Profit While Its Regional Footprint Continues to Grow

M-Pesa Africa has reported its first profit from operations since Safaricom and Vodacom created the joint venture, marking an important milestone for the business behind one of Africa’s largest digital financial platforms.

The company posted a net profit of Sh102.5 million for the year ended March 2026 after recording a Sh2.47 billion loss a year earlier, while the platform expanded to 60 million customers across the continent.

The turnaround reflects more than stronger financial performance. It comes after several years of restructuring that brought ownership of the M-Pesa brand, technology development and regional expansion under a more unified structure shared by Safaricom and Vodacom. At the same time, both companies have continued broadening the range of financial services available through the platform, moving beyond person-to-person transfers into merchant payments, digital lending, savings, insurance and business services.

Revenue at M-Pesa Africa rose 20.6 percent to Sh8.08 billion, reflecting higher adoption across multiple African markets as operators introduced additional products and expanded digital financial services.

For Safaricom, the results reinforce the growing importance of an ecosystem that extends well beyond Kenya, where M-Pesa has evolved from a mobile money service into the company’s largest source of revenue and an increasingly important layer of the country’s digital financial infrastructure. Nearly two decades after launch, the platform functions as the payments rail connecting consumers, merchants, banks, fintechs, developers and public services, reflecting a broader shift from a telecom product into financial infrastructure.

Nearly two decades after its launch, the platform supports payments, merchant commerce, savings, credit, investments and business services that millions of consumers and enterprises rely on every day. Products including Fuliza, KCB M-Pesa, Ziidi Money Market Fund, Pochi la Biashara and Lipa na M-Pesa illustrate how the platform has expanded beyond peer-to-peer transfers into a broader financial ecosystem. That evolution has shifted M-Pesa from a standalone mobile wallet to infrastructure connecting banks, fintechs, merchants, developers and public services through a shared digital payments ecosystem.

The latest profit is the product of decisions made over several years rather than a single year’s growth in transactions.

In March 2020, Safaricom and Vodacom jointly acquired the M-Pesa brand from Vodafone Plc for approximately Sh2.1 billion, creating M-Pesa Africa as a 50-50 joint venture responsible for owning and managing the platform’s intellectual property across the continent.

Before that acquisition, operators paid licensing fees to Vodafone every time they used the M-Pesa brand. The new ownership structure fundamentally changed that arrangement.

Today, those licensing revenues remain within M-Pesa Africa, allowing Safaricom and Vodacom to benefit directly through their equal ownership while supporting continued investment in product development, platform engineering and regional expansion.

The joint venture has also established a recurring revenue stream through a managed services agreement with Safaricom. Under that arrangement, M-Pesa Africa provides technical services and product development for the platform in exchange for a monthly fee equivalent to two percent of M-Pesa transaction revenue.

Together, those changes have transformed M-Pesa Africa from a company built largely around intellectual property into one that also generates income from technology development, platform management and regional product support.

Safaricom further strengthened its position within the ecosystem in 2023 when it acquired M-Pesa Holding Company Limited from Vodafone for a nominal US$1.

The holding company acts as the trustee responsible for safeguarding customer funds held within Kenya’s mobile money system. While the trust structure protecting customer deposits remained unchanged, the transaction gave Safaricom greater ownership of infrastructure supporting one of Africa’s most valuable digital financial platforms.

The timing of M-Pesa Africa’s first operating profit also reflects changes taking place in Kenya’s domestic mobile money market.

According to the Communications Authority’s third-quarter sector statistics for the 2025/26 financial year, Kenya recorded 53.4 million mobile money subscriptions and more than 602,000 registered mobile money agents, creating one of the world’s largest digital financial networks. Those figures illustrate a market where access has already reached national scale. The country’s financial inclusion rate has risen dramatically over the past two decades as mobile money reduced many of the barriers that previously limited access to formal financial services.

For operators such as Safaricom, the next opportunity no longer depends primarily on registering first-time mobile money users. Commercial growth is increasingly being driven by how frequently existing customers use digital financial services for payments, savings, borrowing, investments and everyday commerce.

That evolution helps explain several of Safaricom’s recent product decisions.

Rather than launching standalone applications for new services, the company has been consolidating its digital ecosystem through My OneApp, bringing together M-Pesa, telecommunications services, customer support, Home Internet management and partner services within a single platform.

Recent updates, including biometric authentication, expanded QR payments, Home Internet Family Share, Send to Bank Hakikisha and mini-app integrations, are designed to reduce friction between different services while encouraging customers to complete more financial activities inside the same application. The strategy mirrors a wider industry shift in which digital payment platforms compete less on customer acquisition and more on becoming the primary interface through which users manage everyday financial activity.

Viewed independently, those updates appear incremental.

Viewed alongside M-Pesa Africa’s financial performance, they reveal a broader commercial objective: increasing customer engagement in a market where mobile money registration is already widespread and long-term growth depends increasingly on deeper participation across the digital financial ecosystem rather than customer acquisition alone.

That strategy extends beyond individual consumers.

Safaricom has continued expanding merchant-focused products as businesses adopt digital payments for everyday transactions. During the financial year ended March 2026, Pochi la Biashara grew to 2.1 million merchants, surpassing Lipa na M-Pesa business tills as more micro and small businesses embraced digital payment tools tailored to informal commerce.

For traders such as food vendors, boda boda operators and neighbourhood retailers, products that separate business income from personal funds while reducing payment disputes have made digital payments more practical for day-to-day trading.

Every merchant transaction processed through the platform creates another opportunity for customers and businesses to remain within the broader M-Pesa ecosystem.

That ecosystem increasingly extends beyond consumer payments. Safaricom’s cloud-native Daraja 3.0 developer platform and the Fintech 2.0 core upgrade have strengthened the technology underpinning M-Pesa, enabling the platform to operate at an operational capacity of about 6,000 transactions per second while supporting a growing ecosystem of more than 105,000 developers and 66,000 integrations. The architecture positions M-Pesa not simply as a mobile wallet, but as digital infrastructure that businesses, fintechs, banks and government services can build upon.

The upgrades also introduced cloud-native capabilities designed to minimise downtime, improve scalability and support new payment use cases, including Internet of Things (IoT) applications and increasingly automated digital financial services.

That technical foundation has become increasingly important as Kenya’s digital economy matures.

The next phase of growth depends not only on how many people have access to mobile money, but also on how often they use it for shopping, paying bills, receiving salaries, managing businesses, saving money and accessing other financial services.

Those behavioural changes create additional transaction volumes that ultimately benefit the wider M-Pesa Africa business through licensing, technology services and continued platform development.

The performance of M-Pesa Africa mirrors the strength of Safaricom’s mobile money business in its home market.

For the year ended March 2026, M-Pesa revenue rose 13.4 percent to Sh182.74 billion, accounting for 42 percent of Safaricom’s total revenue of Sh427.6 billion. Mobile money remained the company’s largest business line, generating more revenue than both voice and data services.

Voice revenue grew 3.5 percent to Sh84.8 billion, while mobile and fixed data revenue increased 17.3 percent to Sh111.8 billion.

The performance helped lift Safaricom’s net profit by 37 percent to Sh95.6 billion, supported by continued growth in digital financial services and lower losses from its Ethiopia operation.

Those numbers illustrate how central M-Pesa has become to Safaricom’s commercial model.

What began nearly two decades ago as a domestic money transfer service now underpins payments, merchant commerce, savings, credit, wealth products and digital services that reach millions of customers every day.

The platform is also increasingly becoming the preferred financial gateway for digital businesses. Through Daraja APIs, payment providers, fintech companies and international platforms can integrate directly with M-Pesa for automated collections, instant payment verification and near real-time settlements. This has reduced reliance on traditional banking rails for many digital businesses while expanding the role M-Pesa plays within Kenya’s wider financial system.

That broader role also explains why Safaricom has continued investing beyond the mobile money platform itself.

Safaricom’s investment in fixed broadband may appear separate from M-Pesa at first glance, but the two businesses are becoming more closely connected.

According to the Communications Authority’s latest sector statistics, Safaricom increased its fixed internet market share to 35.5 percent, serving 941,501 broadband subscribers after adding more than 83,000 customers during the quarter.

The operator has paired that network expansion with initiatives such as WiFi Bamba, fibre deployments within affordable housing projects, lower installation costs and partnerships to improve Fibre-to-the-Home experiences.

Each new broadband connection creates another customer relationship that extends beyond internet access.

Households use digital channels to manage subscriptions, settle monthly bills, purchase additional services and access financial products. Through My OneApp, Safaricom is bringing many of those activities into a single customer experience where connectivity and financial services complement one another rather than operating as separate businesses.

That strategy allows the company to deepen customer engagement across multiple products instead of relying on individual services in isolation.

The financial progress at M-Pesa Africa also comes during a period of significant corporate restructuring.

Vodacom recently secured regulatory approval to increase its effective ownership in Safaricom to 55 percent after acquiring the Kenyan government’s 15 percent shareholding and consolidating Vodafone’s remaining indirect interest.

The transaction attracted attention because of its scale, but its implications extend beyond ownership percentages.

With Vodacom holding a controlling stake in Safaricom while jointly owning M-Pesa Africa, the companies now operate within a more closely aligned structure for product development, technology investment and regional expansion.

The arrangement also follows Safaricom’s acquisition of M-Pesa Holding Company and the earlier transfer of the M-Pesa brand into the joint venture.

Taken together, those decisions place much of the platform’s intellectual property, technology development and commercial strategy within a coordinated ownership framework.

That does not guarantee faster expansion, but it gives Safaricom and Vodacom greater flexibility to develop products across markets using shared technology and a common brand strategy.

The latest results also reflect how digital finance is evolving across Africa.

For many years, success in mobile money was measured by the number of registered customers.

Today, the emphasis is different.

Markets such as Kenya already have extensive mobile money penetration, making customer activity a more meaningful measure of growth than registration alone.

That creates opportunities in merchant payments, digital commerce, cross-border transfers, savings, credit, insurance and business financial services.

M-Pesa Africa sits at the centre of that expansion because it supports the technology and intellectual property used across multiple operating companies.

As Safaricom and Vodacom introduce additional services into their respective markets, the value created extends beyond individual subsidiaries to the joint venture itself.

The business benefits from broader platform adoption while operators gain access to shared technology and product development.

M-Pesa Africa’s return to profitability is more than a financial milestone.

It demonstrates that the business model established after the 2020 restructuring is beginning to generate sustainable commercial returns.

Ownership of the brand, recurring managed services income, shared technology development and wider regional adoption are now contributing to the performance of the joint venture rather than functioning as separate initiatives.

For Safaricom, the results reinforce the value of continuing to build an integrated digital ecosystem around M-Pesa.

The company’s recent investments in My OneApp, merchant payments, broadband connectivity, API infrastructure and financial products all point towards the same objective: making M-Pesa part of customers’ everyday financial activity rather than limiting it to money transfers.

Across Africa, the platform now serves 60 million customers, a figure that reflects both geographic expansion and a broader range of services than the platform originally offered.

The next phase of growth is likely to depend less on entering entirely new markets and more on increasing how businesses and consumers use digital financial services within markets where M-Pesa already has a presence.

M-Pesa Africa’s first operating profit suggests that strategy is beginning to produce measurable financial results.

Rather than representing the end of a turnaround, the latest performance offers an early indication of how Safaricom and Vodacom expect the platform to create value as digital finance continues to mature across Africa.

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