It's interesting how SIM hijacking is a serious attack vector for the likes of Twitter, and every month brings a front-page HN article on how SMS is worthless as a form of 2FA, yet in more corrupt and lawless parts of East Africa the phone companies can secure an entire banking system based on phones.
"Kenyan" and "British" are poorly defined categories. They are not mutually exclusive. M-Pesa is a large and complex thing (company, product, service, cultural or economic effect, why not all of those things!)<p>So the answer is null.<p>And since people get so hung up on bs about categories, they will argue about it from an emotional instead of a rational perspective. Those arguments will be endless as (see first paragraph) there is no correct or provable answer.<p>It is important to do this analysis and remind ourselves of these facts whenever a poorly defined question arises involving complex systems (like culture, society, economics or politics).
G-Cash, in the Philippines, was the first mobile based money transfer platform. It was launched in October 2004, a year before M-Pesa.<p>There have been many attempts to replicate M-Pesa's extraordinary success. M-Pesa in Kenya is a significant outlier in the mobile money space.<p>[Edit: assumed M-Pesa founding date of 2007 in wikipedia was when M-Pesa launched. It actually launched pilot in Oct 2005. Exactly one year after Philippines system]
Definitely British. Vodafone started the same service in Fiji, where they call it MPaisa (paisa meaning money in Hindi). A competing service by rival Digicel is called Mobile Money.
Following the money is an unconvincing argument that leads to publicly traded companies being mostly nationless, Nissan being primarily French, Jaguar being primarily Indian, and WeWork being fully Japanese.
<a href="https://owaahh.com/the-age-of-mpesa/" rel="nofollow">https://owaahh.com/the-age-of-mpesa/</a><p>This gives a more succinct history. The idea was that of British citizens working for Vodacom(Safaricom) in Kenya.
Safaricom is good at sales and marketing in East Africa, not at innovation from inside of the company. They do use some clever partners though at times, and the combination can be pretty good. They've obviously taken M-pesa and grown it into a mature product - listening to their clients, but primarily from a sales channel.
Here's a 2015 discussion on the topic, linked to M-Pesa's Wikipedia page: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10612723" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10612723</a><p><i>M-Pesa – a mobile-phone based money transfer and microfinancing service</i>: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa</a><p><i>70 points by melenaboija on Nov 23, 2015 | 37 comments</i><p>Top comment:<p><i>mhogomchungu on Nov 23, 2015<p>Tanzanian here.<p>I think calling the service "M-Pesa" is misleading since a lot of other people are offering the same service.<p>Here in Tanzania,<p>"M-Pesa" is the name for the service offered by vodafone,a mobile communications company.<p>"Tigo Pesa" is the name for the same service offered by tigo,a mobile communication company.<p>"Airtel money" is the name for the same service offered by airtel,a mobile communication company.<p>"EzyPesa" is the name for the same service offered by zantel,a mobile communication company.<p>For the above reasons,i generally call the service offered by these companies as "a banking service managed by mobile phone companies".<p>"Sim banking" is the name of the service offered by a "traditional" bank called crdb[1] so a more generalized name that accommodates both traditional banks and cellular network operator banks is in need.<p>Most traditional banks are also offering the same service.<p>The only thing they all have in common from the user's perspective is that the services are offered through ussd codes[1] meaning they are not tied to mobile phones and they work with any device that supports ussd codes.<p>I have an application called ussd-gui[4][3] that i use to manage by money at vodafone "bank" using a mobile broadband modem on my linux system.<p>[1] <a href="http://crdbbank.com/tz/alternative-banking/simbanking.html" rel="nofollow">http://crdbbank.com/tz/alternative-banking/simbanking.html</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unstructured_Supplementary_Ser.." rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unstructured_Supplementary_Ser...</a>.<p>[3] <a href="https://github.com/mhogomchungu/ussd-gui/blob/master/icons/u.." rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mhogomchungu/ussd-gui/blob/master/icons/u...</a>.<p>[4] <a href="https://github.com/mhogomchungu/ussd-gui" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mhogomchungu/ussd-gui</a> </i>