For the first time in its history, Kenya’s global pioneer of mobile mobile, M-PESA has recorded 40 million users in the east African country alone.
The Safaricom-owned mobile money platform, now serves roughly three out of every four Kenyan adults, and it drives more than 40% of Safaricom’s service revenue, up from about 43% in 2025 and still climbing.
M‑PESA has morphed into a full stack of payments, credit, and investment rails—Lipa na M‑PESA for merchants, Fuliza overdrafts, KCB M‑PESA loans, Ziidi money market funds—that everyone from shop owners to banks and credit unions runs on daily.
M‑PESA added about 30 million users between 2012 and 2026, but in the last few years, it has focused on deepening usage rather than onboarding new people.
Chargeable transactions per active customer keep rising, with more than 21.9 billion transactions worth KES20.2 trillion (US$156.4 billion) processed in six months to September 2025.
The risk, however, is concentration. Even with Airtel Money slowly nibbling M‑PESA’s share, Safaricom still sits on close to 90% of the mobile money market. That gives regulators an ongoing headache: how do you push for more competition without destabilising the one infrastructure layer almost every Kenyan touches in a given week?
The next phase of M‑PESA’s story will not be about adding millions more Kenyans; it will be about what rides on top of it. Ziidi, Global Pay, super‑app “mini‑stores,” cross‑border corridors and embedded credit already show Safaricom retooling M‑PESA from a payments rail into a fintech operating system.
For local banks and fintechs, that is the uncomfortable truth behind the 40‑million headline: the main question is no longer whether you integrate with M‑PESA, but how much of your own margin and customer relationship you are willing to hand over when you do.
