Safaricom's M-Pesa Pivots to Wealth Management and SuperApp Model
Safaricom CEO Peter Ndegwa has outlined a strategy to evolve M-Pesa beyond mobile payments into wealth management and a unified OneApp platform, signalling a major strategic shift for Africa's largest mobile money operator. The pivot positions Safaricom as a full financial services platform rather than a payments utility.
M-Pesa: from pipe to platform — and the number that proves it
511,000 people signed up to buy shares through their phones. 36,000 of them applied for a stock market IPO via M-Pesa. These aren't payment numbers — they're investment numbers, and they arrived in weeks.
That's the real weight of Ndegwa's pivot. M-Pesa already has KSh21 billion in assets under management through its wealth products. The question was always whether ordinary Kenyans would actually use mobile money to invest — not just to pay. Ziidi Trader's early figures suggest they will.
When Africa's largest mobile money platform stops being a pipe that moves money and becomes the place people grow it, that changes what every fintech building on top of it needs to be.
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- Inside Peter Ndegwa’s strategy to grow Safaricom’s financial and digital services business · techtrendske.co.ke · T2