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By Omar Mohammed
NAIROBI, April 6 (Reuters) - Kenya's leading telecom firm
Safaricom and South Africa's Vodacom said on
Monday that they had completed the acquisition of popular mobile
money platform M-Pesa from Britain's Vodafone.
"The transaction... will accelerate M-Pesa's growth in
Africa by giving both Vodacom and Safaricom full control of the
M-Pesa brand, product development and support services as well
as the opportunity to expand M-Pesa into new African markets,"
they said in a statement.
The companies did not disclose the value of the transaction,
which was first announced in 2019 and completed via a
newly-created joint venture, but last year Safaricom's then
chief executive Bob Collymore said the deal could be worth about
$13 million.
M-Pesa, launched in Kenya more than a decade ago, has
evolved from a basic mobile money transfer application into a
fully-fledged financial service platform, offering loans and
savings in partnership with local banks, plus merchant payment
services.
It has grown to become the largest payments platform in
Africa, with 40 million users and processes over a billion
transactions every month, according to Safaricom and Vodacom's
joint statement.
It is now available for subscribers in Kenya, Tanzania,
Lesotho, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, Mozambique and
Egypt.
"This is a significant milestone for Vodacom as it will
accelerate our financial services aspirations in Africa," said
Shameel Joosub, Vodacom Group CEO.
"Our joint venture will allow Vodacom and Safaricom to drive
the next generation of the M-pesa platform – an intelligent,
cloud-based platform for the smartphone age."
(Reporting by Omar Mohammed, additional reporting by Emma
Rumney in Johannesberg; editing by George Obulutsa)
