M-PESA registers 21,000 users in South Africa

M-PESA currently has 21,000 registered users in South Africa, Vodacom CEO Pieter Uys said in a radio interview with Moneyweb.

“So we already have 21,000 registered M-PESA customers but every day we’re adding more distribution points. We’re also now embarking on a road show where we will go out into the communities and teach people about the benefits that M-PESA can bring to them,” Uys said.

About two months ago South African mobile operator, Vodacom, and the country’s fourth largest bank, Nedbank, announced the launch of the M-PESA money transfer service.

Vodacom and Nedbank expects M-PESA to repeat in South Africa the success seen in Kenya, where 10 million people have adopted the service.

“In South Africa, it’s always a chicken-and-egg situation. You need to get distribution points out there as quickly as possible for the M-PESA customers to go and transact at those points, and not just transfer money in between each other,” he noted.

Uys added that M-PESA customers in Tanzania have grown to 3.5 million of which about one million people use the service “every month or almost every day”.