Safaricom has announced the launch of a new product dubbed M-Pesa Go, aimed at enhancing child safety and sound financial knowledge for children below 18 years.
The product seemingly will take the shape of similar products in the banking industry, as the Jumbo Junior accounts for Co-operative Bank that are designed for children below the age of 18 years for the safekeeping of money.
This comes as the telco announced an 8.7 per cent growth in M-Pesa revenue to Ksh56.86 billion, while the one-month number of active M-Pesa customers increased by 8.6 percent to 31.17 million.
“The board is pleased with the results delivered for the first half of the financial year and remains committed to protecting shareholder wealth, by ensuring management puts our customers first, continuously innovating to offer relevant products, services and solutions to meet their needs. We remain mindful of the sustained consumer wallet pressure with rising inflation, the highest in five years at 9.2% in September 2022 and high commodity prices,” notes John Ngumi, Chairman, Safaricom Board of Directors.
The M-Pesa junior accounts will be launched later this month, according to Safaricom CEO Peter Ndegwa who did not divulge further details.
The giant telco is also pushing to be issued with a mobile money licence in Ethiopia, which is its newest market in Africa.
Speaking about the new market, Safaricom revealed that currently it has over 740,000 active customers, and gaining 20,000 every day.
“We are pleased with the commercial progress made in Ethiopia since launch of operations early last month. Most importantly we are enthusiastic on the growth opportunity in Ethiopia, with over 740,000 customers so far and 20,000 new customers joining the network daily. We are also encouraged by data and voice usage levels with 711 MBs average usage per active data customers and 30 Minutes of Use per active voice customers for the month of October,” Ndegwa said.
Mr Ndegwa noted that Safaricom had invested over USD 598million in Ethiopia operations and was encouraged by the early uptake of our services, great customer feedback on the quality of their data experience and the revenue contribution by the Ethiopia unit.
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