Vodacom announced today that its Financial Services business reported a 19.2% rise in revenue to R4.4 billion fuelled by insurance business, with policies up 19.4% to 2.6 million and a recovery in Airtime Advance revenue growth.
The Vodafone-owned company added that normalised M-Pesa revenue growth accelerated to 20.4% in the second quarter, as Tanzania lapped mobile money levies imposed in July 2021 and its new financial services continued to scale.
New financial services such as loans and merchant services contributed more than half of M-Pesa revenue growth in the period.
The group said Safaricom generated financial services revenue of R7.9 billion on a 100% basis, up 8.7%* on a normalised basis.
“Our financial services strategy is supported by a dual-sided ecosystem across consumers and merchants, bringing these segments together through exceptional and personalised experiences relating to entertainment, e-commerce, payments, savings, investments, lending and insurance services,” Vodacom said.
“As key drivers of this strategy, our two super-apps – VodaPay and M-Pesa – integrate our own products and services with the best offerings from our partners.”
In South Africa, Vodacom said its super-app, VodaPay, reached 3.5 million downloads in less than a year since launch.
Across M-Pesa footprint, including Safaricom, app users exceeded 3.2 million.
“Alongside the super-app roll-out, our active merchant base continued to scale meaningfully in South Africa and across our International markets,” Vodacom said.
“Our merchant base across International was up four-fold to almost 137 000,
while Safaricom’s merchant base was up 39.3% to 539 000. This growth helps expand our addressable commission pool beyond peer-to-peer payments and withdrawals into both online and offline commerce.
“Our M-Pesa platform, including Safaricom, processed $355.2 billion or R6.1 trillion of transaction value over the last twelve months, up 17.6%, representing clear leadership in the African fintech space.”
Vodacom added that its efforts to deepen financial inclusion continue to thrive, supported by the double digit increase in financial services customers to 63.1 million (including
Safaricom on a 100% basis).
Financial services opportunity in Ethiopia
In October 2022, and as a result of the significant investment into the country, Safaricom Ethiopia commercially launched mobile operations.
Safaricom Ethiopia’s 2G, 3G and 4G mobile services are currently available in 16 cities,
including Addis Ababa and the country’s second largest city Dire Dawa.
The company plans to launch services in a total of 25 cities by April 2023.
Further, it was confirmed in October 2022 that Safaricom Ethiopia will be awarded
a mobile financial services licence.
“These milestones align with our ambition to transform lives in the country as we seek to connect every Ethiopian to the global digital economy, while also making various ‘Tech for Good’ solutions and services available in health, education, manufacturing, agriculture, and digital finance,” said Vodacom.
