Safaricom’s next billion won’t come from new customers
Safaricom is making M-PESA payments cheaper, increasing mobile data allocations and boosting fibre Internet speeds as Kenya’s largest telecommunications company looks to drive growth by encouraging customers to use its services more frequently, rather than simply adding new subscribers. The changes, announced on Friday under Pata More, a new customer value offering whose Swahili name means “get more”, span almost every major consumer business at Safaricom, from M-PESA and mobile data to fibre broadband, smartphones and customer support. Safaricom already serves most of Kenya’s mobile users, while M-PESA controlled 89.1% of the country’s mobile money market in March 2026, far ahead of Airtel Money’s 10.9% share, according to data by the Communications Authority of Kenya. With relatively few new customers left to acquire, future growth depends on persuading existing users to spend more time and money within the M-PESA ecosystem. Pata More reflects that shift, offering larger data bundles, cheaper merchant payments and bundled services at a time when customers are becoming more selective about their spending and rivals are competing more aggressively on price. Rather than a seasonal promotion, Pata More is designed as a long-term customer value proposition, Safaricom told TechCabal on Saturday. “Pata More responds to the evolving customer needs. Customers are looking for more value, convenience, and support from the services they use every day,” the company said. “Safaricom has been enhancing its offers across connectivity, M-PESA, devices, business solutions and care, and Pata More brings these improvements together under one simple promise: more value from Safaricom.” The battle for everyday payments The most significant changes are within M-PESA, where Safaricom is lowering the cost of making and accepting small-value payments. The company has already doubled the threshold for fee-free payments made through Pochi la Biashara, its payment service for informal traders and sole proprietors who want to accept digital payments without registering a business. Customers can now send up to KES 200 ($1.55) free of charge, up from KES 100 ($0.77), while fees on larger transactions will be capped at KES 50 ($0.39) for 90 days. From August 7, Safaricom will also raise the fee-free threshold on Lipa na M-PESA Buy Goods, the merchant payment service used by registered businesses—to KES 500 ($3.87) from KES 200 ($1.55). Businesses transferring money from their Buy Goods tills to M-PESA wallets or PayBill accounts, which businesses use to collect customer payments such as bills and invoices, will also pay roughly half the previous transfer charges. The changes target the millions of low-value transactions processed across Kenya every day, where even modest fees can determine whether customers choose digital payments or cash. Safaricom believes reducing those costs will encourage more merchants to accept M-PESA while giving customers more reasons to pay digitally. “The objective is to make everyday digital payments more affordable and convenient for customers and small businesses,” Safaricom told TechCabal. According to the company, M-PESA Kadogo, its tariff that waives fees on selected low-value transactions, processed 17.1 billion transactions during the financial year ended March 2026, accounting for 58% of all activity on the platform. That means more than half of all M-PESA transactions already come from small-value payments, suggesting the platform’s next phase of growth depends less on larger transactions than on increasing the volume of everyday purchases flowing through its network. The latest tariff changes are intended to remove some of the pricing friction that still pushes those payments towards cash. “By expanding free Pochi transactions to KES 200 ($1.55), capping Pochi transaction fees at KES 50 ($0.39) for 90 days and raising the Lipa na M-PESA Buy Goods Kadogo threshold from KES 200 ($1.55) to KES 500 ($3.87), we are empowering small businesses by ensuring they keep more of what they earn while giving customers more flexibility to pay digitally,” the company said. Why lower fees make sense Lowering transaction fees may seem counterintuitive for a business that generated KES 182 billion ($1.41 billion) in M-PESA revenue during the year ended March 2026, accounting for 45% of Safaricom Kenya’s service revenue. But the company is betting that cheaper payments will encourage customers and merchants to transact more frequently, allowing higher transaction volumes to offset lower fees. “Our focus is on unlocking market value for everyone,” Safaricom said. “When services become more affordable, useful and easier to access, customers and businesses are more likely to use them consistently. Lower transaction costs support wider digital acceptance, especially for small payments.” The strategy also reflects M-PESA’s evolving role within Safaricom’s wider business. Rather than operating as a standalone payments platform, it has become a gateway to a much broader ecosystem that includes airtime purchases, data bundles, bill payments, merchant services and credit products. Every additional M-PESA transaction therefore creates more opportunities for customers to use other Safaricom services. The company said it will track adoption of Pochi la Biashara, usage of Pochi Kadogo, merchant activity, transaction values, customer behaviour and feedback from small businesses during the 90-day period before deciding whether to extend and refine the programme. “Success will be measured by whether the changes are delivering real value to both customers and merchants,” Safaricom said. Why data got bigger The same strategy extends to Safaricom’s connectivity business, where the company is increasing value without reducing headline prices. Customers buying the KES 20 ($0.15) daily bundle will now receive 250MB instead of 150MB. The KES 99 ($0.77) bundle increases from 1GB to 1.5GB, while the KES 1,000 ($7.75) monthly bundle now includes 21.5GB, more than double the previous 10GB allocation. The move narrows the value gap with Airtel Kenya, which has spent the past two years competing aggressively through larger bundles, promotional offers and lower effective data prices. Safaricom has avoided outright price wars, choosing instead to increase the amount of data customers receive while keeping headline prices unchanged. The strategy is also visible across Safaricom’s other consumer businesses. Fibre customers now receive internet speeds of up to 2.5 times their previous plans, selected smartphones come bundled with connectivity and device insurance, while commercial drivers can
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The $60 million startup tackling Africa’s travel payments problem
Every year, international travellers spend billions of dollars on African safaris, luxury lodges and holiday experiences. Yet before much of that money reaches the businesses providing those experiences, a portion is lost to payment processing fees, foreign exchange charges and the cost of moving money across borders. For African tourism operators, getting paid can be surprisingly expensive. TurnStay, a South African fintech that helps travel businesses accept payments from international guests, believes that problem has been overlooked for too long. Alon Stern, TurnStay’s chief executive officer (CEO) and co-founder, said the three-year-old startup processed over R1 billion ($60.6 million) in travel payments during the first six months of 2026. The company provides payment infrastructure for hotels, safari lodges, tour operators and villa agencies, helping them reduce the cost of accepting international bookings. The milestone underscores a broader challenge facing Africa’s tourism sector. While many operators compete for the same global travellers as hotels and tour companies elsewhere in the world, they often pay significantly more simply to receive payment. Card network fees, foreign exchange spreads, cross-border acquiring costs, and can collectively consume a meaningful share of booking revenue, eroding margins and reducing the amount of tourism income that ultimately remains on the continent. “Getting paid can be expensive in the travel industry, and for a long time African merchants have carried a much heavier cost than their overseas counterparts for doing exactly the same job,” said Stern. He stated that traditional payment processing for international travel bookings can cost African merchants as much as 8% of a transaction. By combining a merchant-of-record model with modern payment rails, including stablecoins for cross-border settlement, TurnStay says it can reduce fees to as little as 1.6%. “The less merchants pay in fees, the more money stays in Africa,” Stern said. “That’s the philosophy behind everything we build. The experiences African travel businesses offer are already world-class. We think the payment infrastructure behind them should be too.” Rather than relying solely on traditional banking infrastructure, TurnStay uses digital payment rails to move money across borders faster and at lower cost before settling funds with merchants. “Global platforms have used this model for years,” stated Stern. “But what we have done is bring that same infrastructure to African travel merchants directly, so a lodge or tour operator doesn’t have to be the size of Airbnb to access it.” The company counts luxury hospitality brands including Singita, Londolozi, Safari.com and The Capital among its customers, with operations expanding beyond South Africa into Kenya, Tanzania, Botswana and Mauritius. TurnStay raised a $300,000 pre-seed round in 2024 followed by a $2 million seed round in 2025 and is now preparing for a Series A fundraising round to accelerate its pan-African expansion. For Stern, the company’s rapid growth is less about payment volumes than correcting a structural imbalance in Africa’s tourism economy. “Three years ago there were two of us and an idea,” he said. “Now we’re processing over a billion rand every six months for some of the best-known names in African travel, and we have just begun.” True scale demands moving beyond surface-level integrations to robust execution. We’ve filtered the noise out of Moonshot 2026, optimising the conference strictly for high-calibre connections between startup founders, global financial operators, enterprise leaders and individuals rewiring Africa’s technical frameworks. Get 20% off Early Bird tickets for a limited time.
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Digital Nomads: How a Nigerian tutor relocated to Thailand on a $500 visa
Ava Anthony arrived in Thailand expecting little more than a holiday. What she found instead unsettled the way she thought about music. One evening, inside a jazz bar, she watched performers whose ease on stage felt almost rehearsed into instinct. Beyond the live performances, she discovered an industry built on years of deliberate preparation, in which aspiring artists could spend seven to nine years training before a record label would consider them ready to debut. For Anthony, a Nigerian singer-songwriter who performs under the stage name ‘Denle,’ the experience raised an uncomfortable question. If Afrobeats has become one of the world’s fastest-growing music genres with far less formal preparation, what could it become if artists developed within similarly structured systems? “There’s a structure that Asia has been able to incorporate,” Anthony told TechCabal. “I’m also taking a look at the numbers and the statistics comparing that to Afrobeats, and the stat is alarming—how they’re doing like 30 to 100 billion streams in a year, and Afrobeats is just doing like 30 [billion streams].” It was an unlikely realisation for someone who had travelled to Thailand on a modest budget, intending to teach English while experiencing life in a different country. Yet that journey would leave her thinking as much about Nigeria’s creative economy as her own career. The irony is that Anthony’s relationship with music began in a far less structured setting. Growing up, mornings in her family home often began with the voices of Nigerian gospel singer Panam Percy Paul or American country musician Jim Reeves drifting through the house. Both of her parents sang in the church choir—her mother still does—and music was woven so naturally into family life that she scarcely noticed its influence. She certainly didn’t imagine it would become the opening chapter of a life that would take her from studying electrical and electronics engineering to working as a digital strategist for major Nigerian brands, teaching English in Thailand and pursuing a career as a singer-songwriter. Nor did she expect that travelling halfway across the world would fundamentally reshape how she thought about the future of African music. From church choirs to campus busking sessions Long before Chiang Mai, there was a 13-year-old girl discovering that her voice could move people. Anthony says she first realised she might actually be able to sing after performing a solo in her church’s children’s choir. Afterwards, a woman approached her mother and remarked in Yoruba, “What a voice your daughter has.” Anthony remembers that moment as a turning point. Encouraged by her mother, what began as a fascination with music gradually evolved into writing original songs while she was still in secondary school. She sang Disney songs alone in her room, joined the school choir and continued writing. Her mother supported her ambitions but insisted that education came first. “Once you get that certificate, then you can go into music,” they told her, according to Anthony. At Landmark University in Kwara State in southwestern Nigeria, she studied Electrical, Electronics and Communications Engineering; she met a guitarist who shared her enthusiasm for performing. Together, they began holding informal Saturday evening busking sessions behind one of the campus cafeterias. What began as two students playing music gradually attracted regular audiences of between 15 and 20 people. “It became an every-Saturday thing,” she said. “That was when I started thinking, ‘okay, I can actually do this in real life.’” After graduating in 2015, the guitarist—Damilola Aalabi ‘Isama’—became her manager, and she began attending recording camps that helped launch her music career. One of the clearest confirmations that she was on the right path came during a recording session for an unreleased song titled Magnificent, performed under her stage name, Denle. She sent the song to her sister in the United Kingdom, who called back in tears. Written for Black girls navigating questions of beauty, race and self-worth, the song resonated deeply with her sister’s experience of living as a Black minority in Britain. That conversation reinforced Anthony’s sense of purpose. “I feel like I was given this gift and this talent to be able not just for myself but for people.” After university, Anthony was posted for the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC), Nigeria’s compulsory one-year national service programme, to Brotherhood Secondary School in Ibesikpo Asutan, Akwa Ibom State, in southern Nigeria. The public school bore little resemblance to the private schools she had attended. She says she arrived on her first day convinced the students would mock her accent. Despite having no formal training as an English teacher, she found herself teaching the subject anyway. Rather than retreat, she leaned into the challenge. One lesson at a time, she built a rapport with her students. She asked what they hoped to become, shared stories of people who had overcome difficult circumstances and, every so often, ended lessons by singing. “Before I leave the class, [the kids] would say, ‘Teacher, teacher, sing one more song,’” she said. “It felt like a beautiful merger: teaching and music.” Teaching may have become her profession, but music never stopped being her ambition. The strategist behind the songs After completing national service, Anthony built a career in digital strategy. Between 2016 and 2020, she said she worked in advertising and branding, developing campaigns for clients including Nigerian tier-one lenders Access Bank and Zenith Bank. She later served as a community manager on a Lagos State gubernatorial campaign that challenged incoming governor Jimi Agbaje in 2019, according to Anthony. Those years gave her something many emerging musicians never acquire: a practical understanding of digital communities, audience development and brand positioning. “I realised that it’s not just for corporate sectors,” she said. “You can actually put that into music and entertainment, into a person.” By 2020, Anthony was ready for another chapter. She had secured admission to the University of Ilorin Business School to pursue a master’s degree, but the COVID-19 pandemic derailed those plans before the programme could begin. “In 2020, I secured admission into the
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