Vodafone partners with Microsoft to accelerate M-Pesa development using AI and cloud
January 16th 2024
M-Pesa, the mobile payment platform of Vodacom and Safaricom, will benefit from the support of American technology company Microsoft to accelerate its development using artificial intelligence (AI) and the cloud. This is part of the clauses of a partnership agreement signed on Tuesday, January 16, between Microsoft and the British company Vodafone, parent company of Vodacom.
Under the terms of the agreement, Microsoft will host M-Pesa on Azure, its cloud computing platform, and facilitate the launch of new cloud-based applications. For its part, Vodafone plans to invest $1.5 billion over ten years in artificial intelligence solutions developed with Azure OpenAI and Microsoft Copilot technologies.
“ This unique strategic partnership with Microsoft will accelerate the digital transformation of our business customers, particularly small and medium-sized businesses, and improve the quality of customer experience for consumers ,” said Margherita Della Valle, Vodafone Group Chief Executive Officer.
This partnership is expected to strengthen M-Pesa services. The platform was unavailable in Kenya for a few hours on January 9, sparking consumer anger. Safaricom which operates M-Pesa in the country attributed the outage to “ scheduled maintenance ”.
According to Vodacom Group’s results for the first half of 2023, M-Pesa had 73.5 million subscribers at the end of September 2023. The platform also saw transactions worth a total of 370.63 billion USD between September 2022 and September 2023.
Source: Agency EcoFin Back