ABA Editorial · Jun 28, 2025 · 9 min read
Safaricom's M-Pesa processed KSh 38.29 trillion in FY2025, serving 35.82 million active customers in Kenya alone. Two decades after launch, East African mobile money is scaling faster by volume than by value, and the next chapter is about what happens when 30 billion transactions a year become normal.
In the fiscal year ending 31 March 2025, Safaricom's M-Pesa processed KSh 38.29 trillion in transaction value across 37.15 billion individual transactions, serving 35.82 million active customers through a network of 298,890 agents. Those are the headline numbers from Safaricom PLC's FY2025 results press release, published 9 May 2025. They describe the largest mobile money platform on the African continent, and one of the largest in the world. They also describe a business in a different phase than the one that defined its first fifteen years.
This is a market report on where East African mobile money stands in 2026, and what the data says about where it goes next.
The most striking feature of Safaricom's FY2025 numbers is the divergence between volume and value growth. M-Pesa transaction value grew 1.6% year-on-year, essentially flat in real terms after inflation. But transaction volumes grew 29.5% year-on-year to 37.15 billion. That gap tells the story of what M-Pesa has become: a platform where customers are transacting more frequently but in smaller average ticket sizes. Chargeable transactions per one-month active customer rose 20.3% year-on-year to 37.92. The average Kenyan M-Pesa user is now making more than one chargeable transaction per day.
For Safaricom the business, this shift has been good. M-Pesa revenue grew 15.2% year-on-year to KSh 161.1 billion, now more than 40% of Safaricom's total service revenue, the clearest signal yet that M-Pesa has become the structural core of the company rather than an adjunct to voice and data. Lipa Na M-Pesa, the merchant payment product, grew revenue 4.4% year-on-year to KSh 7.6 billion, with active merchants up 6.8% to 675,860. The ecosystem economics are scaling even when individual ticket sizes are not.
When a payment platform's volume grows three times faster than its value, it usually means one of two things is happening. The first is that the user base is broadening downmarket, new customers with smaller wallets are joining faster than existing customers are increasing their spend. The second is that the platform is becoming more embedded in daily life, with users making routine payments (transport, bills, airtime, small merchant purchases) that they previously made in cash. In Kenya's case, both are happening.
The broadening of the user base is visible in the customer count: Safaricom's one-month active M-Pesa customers grew 10.5% year-on-year to 35.82 million in FY2025. In a country with 55.1 million people, that is close to universal reach among working-age adults. The deepening of everyday use is visible in the per-customer transaction frequency, 37.92 chargeable transactions per month per active user is genuinely high by any global mobile payments benchmark.
The implication for the next five years is that M-Pesa's growth will increasingly come from categories other than pure money transfer. Merchant payments, overdraft and credit products, cross-border remittances, and savings are the obvious candidates. Safaricom's strategic framing in its FY2025 report, protect the Kenya core, accelerate the transition to a "TechCo," boost the Ethiopia expansion, reflects a company that understands the Kenyan mobile money market has matured and is actively looking for the next S-curve.
Safaricom's expansion into Ethiopia is the biggest single bet on continued M-Pesa growth outside Kenya. Ethiopia is the second-most-populous country in Africa with approximately 126.5 million people, and until recently, it had essentially no mobile money penetration. Safaricom Ethiopia launched operations in 2022 and has been gradually scaling services since. The FY2025 report identifies Ethiopia as a core pillar of Safaricom's Vision 2030 strategy, but the business is still in its early loss-making phase.
For East African mobile money more broadly, Ethiopia represents the biggest greenfield market on the continent. If Safaricom can replicate even half of its Kenyan customer density in Ethiopia, it would mean roughly 30 million additional active M-Pesa users by 2030. That is the kind of growth that would materially change the East African payments landscape.
Outside Safaricom's direct footprint, the other major mobile money player is MTN MoMo, which operates across MTN's markets including Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania (through partners), and South Sudan. MTN Group does not publish country-level mobile money metrics with the same granularity as Safaricom, but its group-level disclosures indicate sustained growth across its mobile money footprint, with particular strength in markets where it enjoys regulatory environments similar to Kenya's.
The competitive dynamic in East Africa is not, however, a two-horse race. In Uganda, Airtel Money has significant share. In Rwanda, Bank of Kigali and KCB Group both went live on PAPSS in February 2025 (launched in Nairobi on 27 February and in Kigali on 26 February), enabling instant cross-border transfers in local currencies for bank customers and bringing banking-system infrastructure into direct competition with telco mobile money for regional flows. Tanzania has a genuinely fragmented market with multiple operators and a regulatory environment that has evolved significantly over the last five years.
Two categories will define the next phase of East African mobile money. The first is cross-border payments. The East African Payment System (EAPS) has existed for years, but adoption has been limited by fragmented liquidity and interoperability issues. PAPSS, the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System launched in January 2022 by Afreximbank and the African Union, is now positioned to act as a "network of networks" connecting regional systems like EAPS with COMESA's REPSS and other sub-regional payment rails. KCB Group's and Bank of Kigali's February 2025 PAPSS launches are early signs that the cross-border infrastructure is moving from announcement to everyday use.
The second is credit. M-Pesa's overdraft and credit products, KCB M-Pesa, M-Shwari, and Fuliza, already constitute a meaningful share of Safaricom's revenue mix. As the Kenyan mobile money market saturates, expanding credit products into Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and Ethiopia is the obvious lever for the next decade of growth. The constraint will be regulatory: each central bank has its own framework for mobile-money-originated lending, and the friction between operators and central banks over credit supervision has been the main brake on growth in multiple markets.
For the rest of 2026, expect three things. First, continued volume growth on M-Pesa well ahead of value growth as the platform deepens into daily life in Kenya and scales in Ethiopia. Second, meaningful cross-border transaction activity on PAPSS as more East African banks integrate the platform into their digital channels. Third, more regulatory attention on mobile-money-originated credit, as central banks balance financial inclusion objectives against concerns about consumer lending practices.
East African mobile money is no longer a revolution. It is infrastructure. And infrastructure, once it works, becomes the foundation for whatever gets built next.
This report draws on Safaricom PLC FY2025 Press Release (9 May 2025); Safaricom FY2025 Earnings Update published by NCBA Investment Bank; PAPSS and Afreximbank press materials on the KCB Group and Bank of Kigali launches (March 2025); and MTN Group and Airtel Africa investor disclosures.