On a Tuesday morning near Kisumu's central market, a mobile money agent counts float before the first customer arrives. She has KES 300,000 in her till. Most of it will cycle through her hands twice before she locks up. Her kiosk is the size of a garden shed. The ledger that runs through it is not.
She does not think of herself as financial infrastructure.
But she is.
In FY2024, M-Pesa processed KES 40.2 trillion in transaction value. It handled 28.3 billion transactions. The Nairobi Securities Exchange recorded KES 105.97 billion in equity turnover in the same period.
M-Pesa runs approximately 379 times the equity market value of Kenya's formal capital exchange.
This is not a fintech comparison. It is evidence that the economy runs on different rails than the official ones.
The scale is continental. MTN MoMo closed 2024 with between 63 and 72.5 million monthly active users across 17 African markets. It processed $321.3 billion in transactions. Across sub-Saharan Africa, the GSMA recorded $1.105 trillion in mobile money transactions in 2024. That figure is a 15 percent increase year-on-year.
M-Pesa alone connects to 950,000 merchants, 5 million businesses, and 600,000 agents. It integrates with every major Kenyan bank, the Kenya Revenue Authority, and county governments. The Central Bank of Kenya does not regulate it like a startup product. It regulates it like a utility.
A financial system this embedded in public revenue, banking, and merchant payments does not compete. It becomes the condition under which other financial products are possible.
Founders who frame mobile money as a payments competitor make a category error.
M-Pesa is not taking share from Visa or bank transfers. It is the substrate on which both need to operate to reach most of Africa's working population. A startup that positions itself as a faster M-Pesa alternative is competing with infrastructure. A startup that builds on M-Pesa's transaction data, agent network, and trust layer is building with it.
The distinction matters for product decisions. The agent in the Kisumu kiosk is not a distribution channel. She is the distribution channel. Selling to her customer means working through her. Building for her customer means understanding she is often the product's actual entry point.
The data layer proves the argument. Fuliza - M-Pesa's overdraft product - reached 17.7 million users in FY2026. Kenyans borrowed KES 1,465.8 billion through it. The average loan was KES 254. That is roughly two US dollars. Those loans exist because Safaricom can score creditworthiness from transaction history no bank has seen. Standard lenders cannot reach this customer. Fuliza can, because it is built on the infrastructure.
The payment problem in Africa's major markets is largely solved.
M-Pesa's share in Kenya declined from 98 percent to 89 percent between 2024 and end-2025. That is the first sustained competitive pressure in 18 years. It signals maturity, not vulnerability. The payments layer is competed. The layer above it is not.
MTN MoMo's advanced services - credit, insurance, merchant payments - grew 40 percent year-on-year in 2024. That is double the growth rate of the core payments business. Digital lending across Africa grew 32 percent between 2020 and 2024. Demand for digital credit jumped five times between 2023 and mid-2025.
Credit scoring, insurance, and working capital tied to receivables - these are the second-layer opportunities that payment infrastructure enables. None of them require building a new payment network. All of them require understanding the one that already exists.
Sixty thousand developers are already connected to the M-Pesa API. The Fintech Association of Kenya is debating whether that layer should open further.
The rails are in place. The question for the next generation of African financial services is not how to lay them.
It is what to run on them.
