Africa’s most popular mobile money remittance service M-Pesa has partnered with global retail tech leader Amazon to offer worldwide remittance services
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M-Pesa has formed a new strategic partnership with Amazon, the prominent US-based e-commerce company, to offer remittance services globally.
The popular mobile money remittance service created by Safaricom, has been operating for 16 years, reaching its first million customers in less than a year. The service was a huge success, but the global crisis that started amid the pandemic brought the company its first profit decline.
Now M-Pesa intends to broaden its reach beyond Africa and increase its global presence in financial markets. The service is also expected to separate from its parent company, Safaricom, soon and establish its independent operations.
The partnership with Amazon will enable and facilitate two-way money flows, broaden M-Pesa’s offerings and improve remittance services for global citizens. The company is particularly eyeing the European market, where it could potentially gain support from Vodafone and Vodacom, Safaricom’s global shareholders.
The UN has forecasted that global remittances will surpass $4 trillion by 2030, while digital cross‑border remittances are expected to grow from $295 billion in 2021 to $428 billion in 2025.
The total volume of international digital remittances will also exhibit a meteoric rise from 1.1 billion in 2022 to over 2 billion globally in 2027, accelerated by the increasing speed of digital remittances.
At the same time, global remittance providers operate in a very competitive environment, led by long-established industry behemoths such as Western Union or MoneyGram. Moreover, innovative fintechs like Wise, World Remit, or Remitly add a competitive edge to the segment, forcing cross-border money transfer firms to focus on creative state-of-the-art customer experiences to stand apart.
