News Highlights:
- M-KOPA has reached a milestone of 5 million customers across Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana, and South Africa, with 2 million added in the last 15 months.
- By leveraging AI-driven analytics and payment data, M-KOPA has facilitated over $1.5 billion in financing, enabling customers to build credit records for future access to digital loans, etc.
M-KOPA, a leading emerging market fintech, has announced that it has surpassed 5 million customers across Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa, with two million of these customers coming on-board in the past 15 months.
M-KOPA’s innovative model makes affordable smartphones embedded with financial services available to ‘Every Day Earners’: the wide majority of African adults who earn their income daily but struggle to afford smartphones and typically fail to qualify for conventional financial services.
According to the World Bank, 75% of adults in sub-Saharan Africa remain financially excluded. To date, M-KOPA has supported its customer base with more than US $1.5 billion in financing.
Starting with smartphone access, customers gain entry to the digital economy with an affordable daily repayment model, which fits their daily income and cash flow and makes it easier to manage.
By leveraging rich payments data and proprietary AI-driven analytics, M-KOPA builds a credit record for each customer which forms the foundation for a long-term financial relationship for lower cost digital loans, affordable data subscriptions and medical insurance.
According to M-KOPA co-founder and CEO, Jesse Moore: “We are thrilled to welcome our 5 millionth customer to M-KOPA this month. The scale of our operations and our positive impact on customers is what keeps us working hard to go even further. We’re just getting started; the opportunity for much larger impact and scale is right in front of us.”
M-KOPA also published its 2024 Impact Report this week, in which the company annually releases its progress against key social and environmental impact metrics. As with prior reports, the 2024 survey of M-KOPA customers was undertaken by a third-party company – Dalberg Research.
Headquartered in London, UK, M-KOPA now creates employment for more than 3,000 staff and 30,000 commission-based sales agents across Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa.
The company has been recognised by the Financial Times as one of Africa’s Fastest Growing Companies for the past 3 years, and by Time Magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential Companies globally for the past 2 years.
