The Quiet Strategy to turn M-Pesa from a Kenyan success story into a single, pan-African, cross-border payments rail
Vodacom–Safaricom: How a Share Deal Quietly Built Africa’s Next Cross-Border Payment Rail
Vodacom and Safaricom are quietly building a pan-African, telco-owned payments rail, using ownership (equity), infrastructure (JV) and product (cross-border M-Pesa) to move from “national telcos” to “regional financial infrastructure providers”.
When Vodacom Tanzania announced its new M-Pesa Global Payment service in November 2025, the headlines were about features: Tap & Pay with Visa, paying Alipay merchants in China, settling with TerraPay merchants in Dubai, and even pushing value directly into MTN MoMo wallets in Uganda.
But the more interesting story sits behind those features: how a 2017 share transfer and a 2020 joint venture have quietly turned Vodacom and Safaricom into a single, pan-African payments machine.
Its telco modernising but It’s also about building a private, regional payment rail that could sit alongside – or even ahead of – traditional banking infrastructure.
- The 2017 pivot: Vodafone moves the pieces on the African chessboard
In May 2017, Vodafone announced that it would transfer a 35% indirect stake in Safaricom to its South African subsidiary, Vodacom, in an all-share deal valued at about $2.6 billion (ZAR 34.6 billion).
A few key things about that transaction:
- Vodafone didn’t “exit” Safaricom; it reorganised its African holdings.
- In exchange for the Safaricom stake, Vodafone received 226.8 million new Vodacom shares, making Safaricom’s performance more directly reflected in Vodacom’s value.
- Vodafone’s CEO at the time explicitly framed this as a step towards a “single, coordinated Africa strategy”, folding sub-Saharan assets under Vodacom’s management.
On paper, it was a corporate reshuffle. Strategically, it did three things:
- Shifted the centre of gravity for the group’s African operations from London to Johannesburg/Nairobi.
- Aligned incentives – Vodacom shareholders now directly benefit from Safaricom’s M-Pesa growth.
- Laid the governance groundwork for something bigger: a unified M-Pesa platform.
In other words, 2017 was about putting ownership in the right place before re-engineering the payments infrastructure itself.
- 2020: Creating M-PESA Africa – the “brain” of the system
The second big move came in 2019–2020.
Vodacom and Safaricom created a joint venture, commonly referred to as M-PESA Africa, and acquired from Vodafone:
- The M-PESA brand,
- Product development, and
- Support services.
The logic was clear in their own language:
- Full control of the brand and technology roadmap
- Ability to accelerate growth of M-Pesa across Africa
- Freedom to enter new markets without routing every decision through Vodafone in the UK.
From that moment:
Safaricom and Vodacom stopped being just “users” of a Vodafone-owned product. They became co-owners of a regional payments platform.
Technically and commercially, this matters because:
- Features, integrations and partnerships (Visa, TerraPay, Thunes etc.) can now be built once and rolled out across multiple markets.
- M-Pesa’s presence – already spanning Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, DRC, Lesotho, Egypt and others – can be coordinated under one pan-African “brain” rather than fragmented local builds.(
If 2017 was about moving the chess pieces, 2020 was the moment they crowned the queen.
- The cross-border layer: from domestic wallet to regional rail
Once ownership and technology were aligned, the next step was inevitable: cross-border money movement.
3.1. M-PESA Global: sending money beyond Kenya’s borders
Safaricom’s M-PESA Global is the first visible proof of this strategy.
- It allows M-Pesa customers in Kenya to send and receive money internationally, to bank accounts, other mobile wallets, and global partners.
- Safaricom has progressively extended this to key corridors – for example, enabling transfers between Kenya and Ethiopia as part of the service’s expansion.
Alongside this, Safaricom has signed deals with Onafriq (formerly MFS Africa) and TerraPay, allowing Kenyan M-Pesa users to send remittances to markets like Ethiopia, Bangladesh and Pakistan via interoperable wallet networks
This is where M-Pesa begins to look less like “a Kenyan mobile wallet” and more like a node on a continental remittance network.
3.2. Vodacom Tanzania’s 2025 launch: the payments story “goes global”
The latest move – and the one that triggered your question – is Vodacom Tanzania’s new global payments offering:
- M-Pesa Global Payment (sometimes described as Global Payments/Global) now lets Tanzanian users:
- Tap & Pay anywhere Visa is accepted using a tokenised M-Pesa Visa card.
- Pay merchants in China via Alipay.
- Transact with merchants in Dubai via TerraPay.
- Pay directly into MTN MoMo wallets in Uganda, powered by partners like Thunes.
The messaging from Vodacom Tanzania is explicit: this is about “opening new trade corridors,” reducing the cost of doing business, and integrating Tanzanian users into the global digital economy
Put simply:
A Tanzanian SME can now use the same M-Pesa wallet they use for local salaries and bills to pay suppliers in China, transact with merchants in Dubai, and trade regionally in East Africa.
That is a very different value proposition from “send money to your cousin up-country.”
- What does all of this really mean?
Seen together – the share deal, the joint venture, the cross-border products – a clear pattern emerges.
4.1. From telco operator to pan-African financial infrastructure
By 2020, commentators already noted that the M-Pesa JV would help Vodacom and Safaricom “drive the next generation of the M-PESA platform – an intelligent, cloud-based platform” across multiple markets.
Now, with cross-border features live in Kenya, Tanzania and beyond, that strategy crystallises into three layers:
- Ownership layer – Vodacom’s stake in Safaricom links shareholder returns across South Africa, Kenya and other markets.
- Platform layer – M-PESA Africa controls the brand and technology stack, harmonising innovation.
- Product layer – M-PESA Global and M-Pesa Global Payment knit together domestic wallets into a regional rail for people and SMEs.
This is the essence of the story: Vodacom + Safaricom are behaving less like separate telcos and more like a combined payment utility operating across their footprint.
4.2. Capturing trade and remittance flows, not just P2P transfers
Traditional mobile money narratives focus on domestic P2P transfers and bill payments. The new strategy is different:
- Remittances: Through partners like Onafriq, TerraPay and others, M-Pesa is increasingly positioned as a preferred channel for sending money into and within Africa.
- Trade payments: Tapping into Visa, Alipay, TerraPay and Thunes effectively lets M-Pesa ride on top of global card and wallet networks – but with M-Pesa as the customer’s primary interface.
- Regional commerce: Linking Tanzania–Uganda–Kenya–Ethiopia corridors enables cross-border settlement in ways that align with AfCFTA’s ambitions, but via private rails rather than only central-bank-led ones.
This shifts M-Pesa’s role from “wallet where money passes through” to “rail where value circulates” – and that is where the deepest monetisation sits (FX spreads, transaction fees, lending based on payment data, etc.).
4.3. Competitive and regulatory pressure
These moves also send a clear signal to competitors and regulators:
- For rivals like MTN and Airtel, the bar is no longer just “national mobile money dominance” but credible cross-border capabilities tied to real-world trade flows.
- For regulators, a pan-regional mobile money rail raises questions around:
- Systemic importance – when does M-Pesa become critical national infrastructure?
- Supervision – how do central banks coordinate oversight across borders?
- Interoperability – should such rails be opened up under fair-access rules, like critical payment systems?
We can already see hints of this in how various central banks classify and license mobile money schemes, and in emerging conversations around regional payment systems under AfCFTA and SADC/EAC frameworks.
- So how should we “read” the Vodacom–Safaricom story?
Putting it all together:
- The share acquisition (2017)
Was not just a portfolio tidy-up. It was Vodafone quietly saying:“Our African growth engine lives in Vodacom + Safaricom, and we need them aligned.” - The M-PESA Africa JV (2019–2020)
Turned M-Pesa from a group asset hosted in the UK into a jointly owned African platform with its own governance and expansion mandate. - Cross-border products (2020–2025)
Are now translating that governance and platform advantage into concrete services that link African consumers and businesses to each other – and to global markets – in real time.
So yes, we can “read meaning” into all of this, and the meaning is quite bold:
Vodacom and Safaricom are building a telco-owned, pan-African payments rail – one that could become as central to everyday economic life as their mobile networks are to communication.
At this point, the question is not whether telcos will play in fintech – that debate is over. The real questions are:
- How much of Africa’s everyday money flows – remittances, retail payments, SME trade, government collections – will end up running over telco-owned rails like M-Pesa?
- How far up the value chain these players will go: will they stop at payments, or move deeper into credit, savings, insurance and trade finance built on top of those rails?
- And for regulators and policymakers, whether public payment and identity infrastructure will partner with, compete with, or quietly depend on the private rails that Vodacom and Safaricom are stitching together.
The Vodacom–Safaricom story is therefore not just a case study in corporate restructuring. It is an early glimpse of how Africa’s digital backbone – connectivity, identity and money movement – may increasingly be shaped by a handful of regional platforms that think like infrastructure providers, not just telcos