M-Pesa 2.0: How Kenya's Mobile Money Rail Is Going Global in 2026

A mobile money app in Kenya moves more money every year than the entire Kenyan economy produces. That is not a rounding error. M-Pesa processed KES 36.2 trillion — approximately $280 billion — in fiscal year 2024. Kenya’s GDP is $115 billion. The math says M-Pesa is moving 2.4 times the country’s economic output through its rails annually. Now the question is whether the world’s most successful mobile money platform can export its model before the next generation of payment infrastructure makes it redundant.

Every central bank in the Global South studying CBDC design has a M-Pesa section in its research briefing. Every fintech founder building for the “unbanked” has either referenced M-Pesa or consciously built against it. The platform is, at this point, the most-cited proof of concept that mobile-first financial infrastructure can actually work at scale — outside the developed-market assumptions that underpin Visa, Mastercard, and SWIFT. If M-Pesa can go genuinely global, the implications for how money moves across EM corridors are significant. If it stalls at the East African border, the lesson is different: regional context is irreplaceable, and scale doesn’t automatically export.

M-Pesa launched in March 2007 as a joint venture between Safaricom — the Kenyan telco majority-owned by Vodafone Group — and the UK Department for International Development. The original pitch was narrow: a way for microfinance borrowers to repay loans via mobile phone. Within two years, Kenyans had found dozens of other uses — paying school fees, transferring money to rural relatives, storing value outside formal banks — that nobody had designed for.

By 2010, M-Pesa agents (physical cash-in/cash-out points, often small shops) outnumbered commercial bank branches across Kenya by a factor of roughly ten. The platform scaled not because it was technologically sophisticated — early M-Pesa ran on USSD protocols, the same 1990s-era SMS-adjacent technology that feature phones use — but because it was embedded in existing social and commercial infrastructure. It trusted human agents where banks trusted brick and mortar. In a country where the average household was 30 kilometres from the nearest bank branch, that bet paid off.

Today Safaricom reports 34 million M-Pesa active users in Kenya alone (November 2024 press release). Across its East and Central Africa footprint — Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Mozambique, DR Congo, and via partnerships in Ghana — the platform serves approximately 66 million users (Vodafone/Safaricom FY2024).

The globalisation play has two components, and they are structurally different. The first is the M-Pesa GlobalPay virtual Visa card, launched 2022 and expanded significantly in 2024. This allows any M-Pesa wallet holder to make international e-commerce purchases using their M-Pesa balance as funding — effectively connecting a mobile wallet to the Visa rails that power most of global online commerce. For a Kenyan student paying for a Coursera subscription or an entrepreneur buying from Alibaba, GlobalPay removes the need for a physical bank account or international credit card.

The second component is interoperability at the institutional level. M-Pesa has established technical bridges with Airtel Money and MTN Mobile Money (MoMo) through the GSMA’s Mobile Money Interoperability initiative. This means users on different mobile money platforms can, in theory, send money to each other without both parties being on M-Pesa. The practical rollout has been uneven — Tanzania has the most functional cross-platform interoperability in East Africa — but the direction is clear. The long-term vision is a unified African mobile money layer where the underlying network is irrelevant to the end user.

Kenya received $4.2 billion in diaspora remittances in 2024, according to the Central Bank of Kenya’s annual report. The UK and the US are the two largest source corridors. The Kenyan diaspora in the UK alone is estimated at over 100,000 people. At average remittance fees of 5–7% (World Bank global average), the cost of moving that $4.2 billion home runs to somewhere between $210 million and $294 million annually — money that disappears into bank transfer fees, FX spreads, and intermediary charges.

M-Pesa’s ambition is to own a larger slice of that inbound flow. The UK partnership with WorldRemit (now part of Zepz, which processes significant M-Pesa-denominated remittances) and the Australia–Kenya corridor opened via partnership with Western Union in 2024 are early experiments in this direction. But the rates tell a more honest story. On the Kenya–UAE corridor, a $200 transfer via Wise costs approximately 0.8–1.2% in fees and arrives within one business day. An equivalent M-Pesa international transfer — routed through mobile money partners — typically costs 2–4% and involves more friction for the sender outside Africa.

Here is the honest version. M-Pesa’s global expansion has been announced in various forms since approximately 2018. The company has partnerships with dozens of global payment providers. The M-Pesa app has been redesigned and relaunched multiple times. And yet, as of mid-2026, M-Pesa remains functionally a regional East African product with some international bolt-ons. The GlobalPay card works but is not widely used for large transactions. The interoperability frameworks with MTN and Airtel are technically functional but commercially underutilised — the incentive for each network to promote a competitor’s product is structurally low.

The deeper problem is that M-Pesa’s competitive moat — USSD-based low-cost infrastructure, a massive physical agent network, deep government relationships in Kenya — does not automatically translate outside East Africa. In Nigeria, where the same mobile money opportunity exists on paper, M-Pesa has never achieved meaningful scale. In West Africa, MTN MoMo and Orange Money dominate. Each market has its own incumbent telco, its own regulatory environment, and its own customer behaviour patterns. M-Pesa is not the iOS App Store of African mobile money. It is, so far, the leading platform in one very well-developed region.

This is where M-Pesa’s global relevance extends beyond Safaricom’s balance sheet. The Bank for International Settlements, the IMF, and at least fourteen central banks across the Global South have cited M-Pesa as a real-world data point in their CBDC design documents. The core insight: financial inclusion at scale does not require bank accounts, does not require a smartphone, and does not require a conventional banking licence. It requires ubiquitous access points (agents), a simple interface (USSD or basic app), and trust (built through Safaricom’s telco relationship, not through regulatory branding).

Nigeria’s eNaira CBDC, Ghana’s e-Cedi, and Tanzania’s planned Digital Shilling are all, in different ways, attempts to replicate M-Pesa’s inclusion model with state-backed currency rather than telco-backed mobile money. The question none of them have answered yet is whether government can replicate the agent network culture that made M-Pesa work — the hundreds of thousands of small merchants who adopted M-Pesa because it was commercially rational for them to do so, not because a government programme mandated it.

Safaricom’s medium-term plan, outlined in its FY2025 investor presentations, involves deepening the financial services stack on top of M-Pesa rather than pure geographic expansion. M-Pesa Savings (linked to money market funds via CBA and other Kenyan banks), M-Pesa insurance products, and the M-Pesa Business API (allowing Kenyan e-commerce to integrate directly into wallet flows) are all higher-margin plays than raw transaction volume. The international expansion is real but secondary to monetising the 31-million-user base in Kenya more deeply.

For the EM-focused investor, the M-Pesa story is not about whether to buy Safaricom stock on the Nairobi Securities Exchange (though EMA-listed instruments do give some exposure). It is about understanding that the mobile money layer is being built, tested, and refined in East Africa at a pace that no developed-market fintech is matching. When intra-African trade volumes rise — whether via AfCFTA or PAPSS or organic bilateral commerce — the infrastructure for settling those trades will not be SWIFT. It will be something that looks very much like what M-Pesa has been quietly building since 2007.

The platform that moved 2.4 times Kenya’s GDP in a single year is only constrained by borders it was never designed to cross. The question is whether 2027 is the year those borders start to feel optional.

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