M-Pesa – a mobile-phone based money transfer and microfinancing service
A lot of debate&#x27;s going round over what is M-Pesa and what it isn&#x27;t. Yes, M-Pesa is the specific variant of mobile money transfer introduced by Vodacom. However, M-Pesa in Kenya is what pushed mobile money transfers to light in Africa. For the longest while it wasn&#x27;t just successful, but also the only large scale deployment of such a service (At least Half of GDP flows through the service!). Unlike other countries that had continual relaunches, rebrands, and failures, M-Pesa just bloomed. All that led to this brand genericide where it&#x27;s much easier to talk of M-Pesa rather than account for Tigo, Airtel money, and all other fledgling counterparts. M-Pesa is the &#x27;kleenex&#x27; &#x2F; &#x27;xerox&#x27; of mobile money transfers. (African Telecos are always being acquired, renamed, or merged leading to rebooting&#x2F;relaunching of their mobile money brands. Contrastingly, Safaricom, the telecommunications company that deploys M-Pesa, is remarkably stable and is the biggest earning corporate entity in Eastern &amp; Central Africa)