Airtel Kenya separates mobile money business from telecom services

By Chisom Nwatu

 

Airtel Kenya has successfully separated and transferred its mobile money unit, Airtel Money, to the new entity Airtel Money Kenya Limited (AMKL), Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) announced on Tuesday.

This means that Airtel Kenya will now operate its telecommunications services and mobile money unit, which were previously under Airtel Networks Kenya Limited, as independent entities.

“CBK welcomes this milestone. The completion of this restructuring enables AMKL to ring-fence its operations and focus exclusively on its mobile money business,” Kenya’s central bank said.

“Significantly, this sets the foundation for AMKL to enhance governance over its mobile money business, strengthen its operations, and offer better services to its customers,” it said.

AMKL was licensed by CBK as a Payment Service Provider (PSP) under the National Payment System Act, 2011 on January 21, 2022, and granted a transition period to complete the transfer.

AMKL and Airtel Networks Kenya Limited will now operate as separate subsidiaries of Airtel Africa which has its headquarters in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Airtel Kenya is currently Kenya’s second-largest mobile operator with 16.9 million subscribers after Safaricom which has 41.4 million out of 64.7 million registered mobile subscribers.

Telkom Kenya is second with 3.4 million subscribers followed by Equitel with 1.4 million, and Jamii Telecom with 272,392 subscribers.

In a market with 37.2 million mobile money subscribers, Airtel Money comes second with deposits valued at Ksh 1.5 billion compared to Safaricom’s Ksh 1.3 trillion, according to data by CA.

The split of telecommunications and mobile money comes amid calls to split Safaricom telecommunications services from its giant mobile money services, M-pesa, which dominates the space transactions, agents as well as subscriptions.

Meanwhile CBK in July introduced paybill interoperability allowing customers to pay merchants from any mobile money service they subscribe to.

The paybill interoperability is expected to foster competition in the mobile money payment segment which is currently dominated by Safaricom’s M-pesa services which handled more than 95pc of mobile money transactions as of March this year.