In its annual report for the year to end March 2015, Vodacom tries to be frank about the re-relaunch in South Africa of M-Pesa, the mobile money transfer service that has fast become the de facto banking system in East Africa. This success in Kenya (and
Anyone who has recently spent time in Kenya, Zimbabwe or Tanzania will have noticed the pervasive influence of mobile money on everyday life. People use it for a wide range of purposes from buying airtime to paying taxi drivers to making loan repayments
A second attempt by Vodacom to launch the M-Pesa mobile payments platform in South Africa has flopped. On Monday, the mobile operator conceded that since it relaunched M-Pesa in the
Big changes are sweeping through the management corridors at MTN Group, with a former top Vodacom managing executive, digital financial services expert Herman Singh, set to take the leading
In a potentially groundbreaking development, MTN and Vodafone have announced that MTN Mobile Money and M-Pesa customers in East Africa will soon be able to transfer money to each other
M-Pesa users in Kenya and Tanzania can now send money to each other electronically using their mobile phones, Vodacom said on Monday. Vodacom has 7m M-Pesa customers in Tanzania, while sister company Safaricom has 18m in Kenya. The
Vodacom’s normalised revenues in its third financial quarter ended 31 December 2014 fell by 1,1% year on year to R20bn, with service revenue down by 2,7% to R15,8bn, despite the group adding 5,1m customers
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” So reads the opening line of Leon Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. The novel comes to mind when looking at the prospects that confront mobile money. Success stories have many similarities, but failed efforts fail for their own
M-Pesa has seen an impressive uptake for Vodacom in Tanzania, but the telecommunications operator has struggled to get a solid footing for the mobile money platform in its home market of South Africa. Part of the reason for success in Tanzania, where
How is this for ambitious? Vodacom in South Africa is hoping to sign up 10m subscribers to its M-Pesa mobile banking and payments platform within the next five years. To put that in context, the cellular operator managed to
