The M-Pesa revenues have recovered as a result of the fee reinstatement on person-to-person transactions on the platform.
Kenya and other African countries intermitted charges on certain transactions on M-Pesa to offer financial relief to their citizens besides aiming at reducing the use of cash to suppress the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Vodacom says revenue from the international M-Pesa business, excluding Kenya, increased by 10 percent to Sh8.5 billion in the quarter ended December compared to Sh7.7 billion a year earlier.
The performance was boosted by the reinstatement of peer-to-peer fees in Mozambique in October 2020 and ongoing platform promotion as customers and governments adopted digital ways of working, Vodacom said.
Kenya and other markets also permitted the M-Pesa charges to resume in January, brightening the outlook for the financial platform’s revenue growth.
In the quarter under review, M-Pesa customers in the international operations escalated by 7.7 percent to 16 million whereas the average monthly M-Pesa transactions increased by 57.8 percent to $24.2 billion (Sh2.6 trillion).
In Kenya, Safaricom re-established the charges on lower-value transactions effective January 1, 2021, in a deal with the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) that reduction in the fees on some bands.
Transactions worth between Sh101 and Sh500 now cost sh6 from the previous sh 11 and transactions between Sh1,501 and Sh2,500 now cost 32 compared to Sh41 previously. However, all transactions of Sh100 and below continue to be free.
M-Pesa presently provides 28.8 percent of Safaricom’s total revenue and, the share had been increasing before the zero-rating policy lowered it from highs of 33.3 percent.
