Safaricom's Ethiopia bet is finally paying off. The numbers behind it
Three years of losses, then an inflection quarter. What changed in Addis, and why M-PESA's second act looks different.
Kwame Mensah
East Africa Correspondent
11 min read
Lagos does not announce its inflection points. They show up first in the terminals: the agent kiosks that keep working through network outages, the settlement times that quietly drop from hours to seconds, the fee schedules that get rewritten overnight. The story below was assembled from operator data, regulatory filings, and interviews with fourteen people across the payments value chain.
The headline number is real, but it is not the interesting one. What matters is the concentration underneath it: the share of offline merchant volume now clearing through a single set of rails, and what that means for everyone still building on the old assumptions.