The MPESA platform is owned by a UK firm, Vodafone. This company owns a 40% stake in Safaricom. That is why Vodafone takes home 10-25 per cent of MPESA revenues. Vodafone is also credited for introducing the MPESA platform in Kenya.
The six months up to September, 2014 the company received Shs 1.7 billion as license fees from Safaricom. This is 11 per cent of the Kshs 15.6 billion that Safaricom made in the last quarter.
Safaricom is making plans to move the MPESA platform from Germany where it is based currently to Kenya. This will reduce the licensing fee by a great margin.
Currently, the MPESA platform is overwhelmed by the large number of transactions that users make every day. It is estimated that 250 transactions take place every second. At times this bulky transactions lead to temporary shutdowns.
Subscribers
MPESA subscribers are always increasing. In 2012, there were 14.9 million subscribers. This has increased to 19.95 million subscribers in 2014. This has also led to increasing numbers of agents from 39,400 to 80,335 in the same period. This is a 49% increase in the number of MPESA agents.
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