CAN SAFARICOM MPESA PIONEER A DIGITAL CURRENCY PATH FOR AFRICA?

 MPESA  a platform by Safaricom is Africa's most successful mobile service. With a level of sucess unimaginable by most in 2007 when the service was launched, it is now so powerful to the level that the dependency on this platform should have both the government and the citizen worried whether, MPESA is powerful enough to sabotage the whole economies on Kenya and the list of other countries where MPESA operates such as Tanzania, Mozambique, DRC, Lesotho, Ghana, Egypt, Afghanistan, and South Africa.

As a global pioneer in mobile money with the M-Pesa wallet, Kenya has a huge and robust digital money market. The country had 68.03 million mobile money accounts as at Dec. 2021, mostly in M-Pesa.M-Pesa fulfills 60 million transactions per day across its network and the volume . Mobile money payments in Kenya took off in the first half of this year as users continued to embrace the cashless system as part of a measure to contain the spread of Covid-19.

The data by the Central Bank of Kenya shows the growth of Sh190 billion in mobile money payments in the period between January to June this year compared to a similar period last year. 

According to the monthly transaction data by CBK, Kenya’s mobile money transactions jumped to Sh3.26 trillion during the period under review compared to Sh3.06 trillion between July to December last year.

The Kenya Central Bank has itself pointed to the direction of exploring a Digital currency to counter the high cost of transaction with mobile money service. That however is far from realization but the critical matter to address is this over reliance and absolute take over of the financial system from Banks to mobile money by MPESA which is said to be regulated by the Central bank but at some point many might wonder if MPESA could grow big enough to undercut the Central bank and event to some extent dictate terms and conditions as the economies move fully digital in the near future.

With the fast rising popularity of Crypto and Digital currency, there is a very high probability that Safaricom through Mpesa or other platforms could develop its own block chain and crypto currency and if that is developed all hell will break lose as crypto is hardly regulated. Safaricom already has the capability and the systems to make Safaricom Cryptocurrency or MPESA Digital currency in other forms. 

What are your thoughts on Safaricom MPESA and the crypto revolution?