Q & AAfrica

Africa’s M-PESA Money Transfer System Comes to Europe

M-PESA advertisement in a coffee shop in Kenya, June 30, 2012 (photo by Wikimedia user Raidarmax licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license).
M-PESA advertisement in a coffee shop in Kenya, June 30, 2012 (photo by Wikimedia user Raidarmax licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license).
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Last month the Kenyan-based mobile money transfer system M-PESA launched in Romania. In an email interview, Diane Mullenex, a partner at the law firm of Pinsent Masons, discussed the expansion of M-PESA outside of Africa. WPR: Why did M-PESA choose Romania as its first European country of operations? Diane Mullenex: M-PESA’s success in Kenya was primarily due to several factors, including the existence of a mostly “unbanked” population, a high penetration rate of mobile phones and a non-competitive market. Naturally, when it decided to expand its M-PESA service, Vodafone searched for countries presenting the same characteristics. After India in 2013, […]

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