Safaricom Mobile Money Transfer Coming to the UK

Kenya's Safaricom is preparing to expand its mobile money transfer service, M-Pesa to allow transfers between Kenya and the UK, the company's chief executive has said. Mr Michael Joseph told the Business Daily that trials were on for the service that would enable Kenyans living in the UK to send money to their relatives back home through M-Pesa.

"A number of options are being considered for the service, including use of a banking channel or setting up an M-Pesa service in UK," he said.

Vodafone, which owns 35% of Safaricom is already promoting M-Pesa based services in Afghanistan - and naturally, owns a network in the UK.

Safaricom also plans to introduce the money transfer service in the greater East Africa region in a year.

Safaricom launched M-Pesa in March , 2007 and has more than 1.7 million customers out of the 9.7 million subscribers registered as users.

On the web: Business Daily

Posted to the site on 20th February 2008