Kenya’s biggest company by market value Safaricom PLC says its in talks with American technology giant Amazon to integrate M-PESA as a payment option when shopping.
This will make it easier for those customers who use Amazon to shop and ship goods to Kenya.
“It is an important partnership as we go into new areas such as cloud,” Chief Executive Officer Peter Ndegwa said on Thursday during an investor briefing after the announcement of their full year 2021 financial results.
Safaricom in 2020 entered into a strategic agreement offering Amazon Web Services (AWS) to East African customers to quickly get started on AWS cloud and accelerate innovation.
Safaricom’s desire to introduce M-Pesa as a payment method on Amazon is in line with its expansion strategy.
Other partnership agreements include Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holdings Ltd and PayPal Holdings Inc.
M-PESA Global: Best Option to Make and Receive Payments Globally
If successful, the Safaricom-Amazon partnership will increase its revenue for M-Pesa, which saw a 2.1% decline in revenue in H1 2020 due to government-imposed free operations during the Covid-19 crisis.
Growth was restored in H2 with the end of free transactions in Q4.
The value of M-Pesa transactions increased by 58.2% YoY to KSh22.04 trillion ($205.5 billion). Transaction volume increased by 29.8% to KSh11.68 billion from KSH9 billion in 2019.
