M-Pesa has partnered with Visa to enable users of the mobile platform to make payments on e-commerce sites as well as send money internationally and make cross-border payments. 

Safaricom’s M-Pesa is celebrated globally as it transformed banking and mobile transactions while Visa is the world’s largest retail electronic payments company.

The partnership between M-Pesa and Safaricom seek to enable tourists touring Kenya to use the mobile payment platform and users abroad to use M-Pesa to make payments while abroad.

The partnership by the two entities awaits regulatory approvals and is set to boost mobile payments and purchases from global brands like Amazon, Ali Baba among others.

“With this joint effort, Visa and Safaricom will seek to eliminate barriers to global commerce and offer an expanded set of mobile e-commerce capabilities to merchants and consumers by enabling secure and convenient cashless payment solutions,” said Visa on its website.

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M-Pesa is Africa’s largest Fintech and largest mobile money service with more than 40 million users in Kenya, Tanzania, Ghana, Lesotho, Mozambique, the DRC and Egypt.

The platform boasts of 400,000 30-day active merchants and 8 million MSMEs, among them are more than 240,000 merchants and 5 million MSMEs in Kenya alone, according to a Citi report.

In April, Safaricom and Vodacom fully acquired the M-Pesa brand from UK telecommunication giant Vodafone in a deal aimed at making M-Pesa spread faster across Africa.

The partnership with M-Pesa is expected to expand the Visa network in the continent while boosting M-Pesa’s presence outside Kenya and especially outside Africa.