Safaricom to disrupt the Financial Sector

Safaricom PLC is a listed Kenyan mobile network operator headquartered at Safaricom House in Nairobi, Kenya.[ It is the largest telecommunications provider in Kenya, and one of the most profitable companies in the East and Central African region. The company offers mobile telephony, mobile money transfer, consumer electronics, eCommerce, cloud computing, data, music streaming, and fiber optic services. It is most renowned as the home of MPESA, a mobile banking SMS-based service.
Through in-house development and partnerships, the company has been adding consumer and small business-based products to its mobile and fintech network. These include digital TV, the M-Kopa solar-powered lighting kit, Lipa-Na bill pay service, and Little ride-hail app―now going head to head with Uber Kenya. Safaricom will launch an e-commerce platform in the coming months dubbed Masoko.
Safaricom, Kenya’s largest telecom company and provider of the nation’s mobile money service, M-Pesa, has launched a new innovation center in Nairobi, Named Safaricom Alpha, a priority of the incubator is to identify spending patterns on mPesa and turn those insights into additional Safaricom products — according to Chief Innovation Officer, Kamal Bhattacharya.
“Safaricom’s unique in that we have telco services and a financial services platform that connects nearly every household in Kenya largely on the basis of trade,” he Chief Innovation Officer, Kamal Bhattacharya, told TechCrunch at Startup Battlefield Africa.
While still under construction, Safaricom’s innovation center is now operational. The product incubator will eventually connect to a VC function, including Safaricom’s Spark Venture Fund, to support investments and partnerships. “We haven’t formalized those kinds of things yet, but it will happen over time,” said Bhattacharya.
With this kind of developments, this is mean to disrupt the financial sector more so the banking sector, that will need to re-strategize since if the local mwanachi is able to access funding and save funds from Safaricom by just a click of a button, banks will have to re-strategize to accommodate the normal mwanachi that might be unable to access internet banking.

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