Safaricom might soon be bringing ads to the new M-Pesa app as it seeks to raise more revenues from the mobile money service.
The planned advertising feature according to a report by Business Daily comes after the telco’s parent company Vodacom Group signed an agreement with China’s Ant Group which runs the popular mobile and online payment platform Alipay that has more than one billion users.
The report notes that Vodacom is already implementing the Alipay app in South Africa and some of its features such as advertising will be built into the M-Pesa platform for rollout in Kenya and Tanzania.
With the new update, businesses will use the mini-app feature to advertise their products in the M-Pesa app.
Safaricom launched the new M-Pesa super app back in June this year. With the new M-PESA Super App, Safaricom basically brought front-end insights on customer spending, direct access to statements, and much more into one single app.
Advertising will be the latest expansion of the M-Pesa service which has grown to become its single biggest revenue earner and has also been described as Africa’s biggest fintech. The mobile money reached 50 million monthly active customers in Africa, in September.
Safaricom launched M-Pesa more than 14 years ago in Kenya, and today the service is also available, Tanzania, Mozambique, DRC, Lesotho, Ghana, and Egypt.
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