Mastercard and Safaricom Team on Cross-Border Payments in Kenya

Mastercard has launched a partnership with East African telecom Safaricom.

The collaboration, announced in a news release Thursday (Sept. 19), is designed to boost the adoption of payment acceptance and cross-border remittance services in Kenya for the benefit of more than 636,000 merchants using M-PESA, Safaricom’s mobile money service.

“Kenya’s payment acceptance market continues to grow, with mobile wallet payments driven by M-PESA showing a 12.7% CAGR between 2020 and 2024,” the companies said. “Leveraging M-PESA’s extensive merchant network and Mastercard’s global payment infrastructure, this partnership will make more seamless, secure, and scalable payment solutions available to merchants, enabling them to serve customers across global markets.”

The release added that the partnership also aims to boost remittance services to streamline cross-border transactions.

The partnership is scaling digital payments in Kenya by embedding Mastercard’s omnichannel acceptance solutions for M-PESA’s B2B transactions, the companies added. And by integrating Mastercard’s infrastructure, Safaricom can enhance cross-border money transfers while helping merchants accept digital payments.

“This collaboration with Mastercard unlocks new opportunities for M-PESA merchants, aligning with our mission to deliver innovative, customer-centric products,” said Esther Waititu, Safaricom’s chief financial services officer.

“By combining our expertise with Mastercard’s global acceptance network, we are enabling businesses to provide more efficient and frictionless payment solutions to their customers, both in Kenya and beyond,” she added.

This partnership follows Mastercard’s recent team-up with Saudi financial services startup barq, which is using Mastercard Gateway technology to broaden the range of payment acceptance solutions it offers to merchants and consumers.

As PYMNTS wrote, this will allow barq to provide additional offerings to Saudi businesses and consumers who are increasingly seeking cross-border services and remittance solutions.

In related news, PYMNTS explored the lack of cross-border interoperability in digital wallets in a conversation with TerraPay President Ruben Salazar Genovez earlier this month.

“We have huge respect for all the technology and the architecture and the user experience that our partners have been building in their domestic spaces,” Genovez told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster. “But the reality is that today, it’s very easy to travel with a piece of plastic, but it’s very difficult to travel with a piece of software. And so, we want to enable these wallets to be able to provide the same user experience and the same sort of payment capabilities when they travel abroad. And that is a gigantic task.”